You might not think that a bunch of kids in the 80s would be interested in stories of my dad growing up in south Philadelphia in the 40s. But my dad had a way of telling his stories that would grab any listener, no matter their age. And the stories themselves were universal. Fighting with his younger brother over a baby blue bicycle. Tricking a neighborhood bully into holding a baby duck – that then shat all over him. A tattletale kid who left a rotten banana in his desk over break.

He passed away last December. Today he would have been 88. But the things I learned from him about holding an audience, about the rhythm and cadence of stories – about why we tell stories, why they matter, and what they can do – those lessons live on in my writing, and I thought they might be useful to you.

The Stage

Dad was a professor of English and Theater. Most of my childhood was spent at the community theatre my parents ran together for decades. As a kid, I attended rehearsals and watched my dad work with his actors. As a teenager, I often ran the box office, since an independent theater is always one show away from closing, in my experience.

I saw my dad work with each of his actors, and he epitomized Shakespeare’s ‘there are no small parts.’ The care he would take with every part, every word. Trained as a Shakespearean, he taught me to relish words themselves and their power to move and transform. Dad would go from actor to actor, talking through a play from their perspective, as though in that moment they were the only character that mattered. Whenever I sit down to write, I go through every character in my scene, trying to imagine how they’re seeing and reacting to the other characters.

Of course, when I’m on the performance capture stage working with actors, it’s as a writer, not a director. Sometimes, I think writers have a hard time letting go of their work, but unless you’re a novelist, the story you tell is a collaboration, a conversation between the various talented folk who bring that script to life. Before I hit puberty, I’d probably seen a hundred plays or more, Shakespeare to Stoppard to musicals like Pippin. That exposure to live drama tuned my ear for dialogue and ensured that I never forgot that at the end of the day, telling a story isn’t about you, it’s about your audience.

Prison

Before my parents started running the community theater, Dad had a troupe of actors who performed improv as well as short plays. One of the most amazing things he did was go on tour with his actors, performing at prisons throughout Florida. This was before I was born, but I remember him telling me that this audience, prisoners, taught him to look at the stage and the role of drama in a completely different way. When he’d talk about this tour, he’d start with how nervous his actors were, performing Beckett and Pinter and Stoppard for the inmates. A more intimidating audience you couldn’t find, I’m sure. But my dad was fearless on stage.

During the tour, he found that these inmates were one of the most engaged and curious audiences he’d ever performed for. How they’d often blur the line between performers and audience, sometimes even shouting out questions or additions. Clearly these performances were an outlet for the prisoners, an opportunity to escape the drudgery of their lives. My dad loved this interaction. Later, when I became a game writer, we often talked about the similarities between the stage and the game. We even wrote a scholarly article about it that was published in Modern Drama.

When I write, it’s never in a vacuum. I am always thinking about my audience, who they are, what they want. What they’ve experienced before. How to surprise them. Delight them. My dad instilled in me that storytelling isn’t an ivory tower discipline, but a vital part of community.

The Bone Marrow Unit

When my dad was dying in the hospital, it too was a setting as significant as a prison. The stories he told me and my friends at school were also stories he’d told other children as a volunteer in the bone marrow unit of our local hospital. One of the things people always noticed about my dad was how effortlessly he gave his time to others, but none was more noble than him telling stories to these kids with leukemia awaiting bone marrow transplants. The painful process left these kids exhausted. And my dad told them stories.

His collection of stories, A Fish in the Moonlight, was one of his proudest achievements. I still marvel at how his prose style and his storytelling cadence match each other completely. He told stories effortlessly, with great humanity. My dad did a lot of good during his time on this earth, teaching for almost half a century, running an independent theater, and mentoring generations of students. But nothing was more immediate and personal and rewarding to him, I think, than telling stories in the bone marrow unit.

To say that stories are a way of escaping one’s life, is often meant in the pejorative. But to these kids, many of whom wouldn’t survive the bone marrow unit, I like to think they were a way to experience a normal childhood the only way they could. When my dad told them about sneaking into a neighbor’s house to steal their chocolate -- only to get caught -- the kids were right there with him. Stories are about connection, about sharing an experience -- real or not -- with someone else. We see the world through stories, though that are told to us, and the ones we leave behind.

Conclusion

Part of my career has become advocating for storytelling in games because I know how important they are to the people who play them, how important they were to me as a kid. Some people still discount storytelling in games. But my dad never did, even though he never played them. Because my dad was a curious man. Almost childlike. Which is why he could connect with pretty much anyone.

He taught me that curiosity is essential to a storyteller, unless you only want to tell stories about yourself. In the hospital, even in the last weeks of his life, he was asking the nurses about their lives. This curiosity extended to a genuine fascination with videogames, a medium that didn’t exist until he was in his 40s. He saw them as an extension of theater, with the audience as collaborators, taking on a role. This curiosity helped him become a masterful teacher, storyteller, and father, and kept him young until his death.

There’s a quote my dad loved from one of his favorite playwrights, Tom Stoppard. As it would happen, he passed away a few days before my dad. In honor of both, I’ll leave this with you.

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

- Tom Stoppard

------

If you’re interested in my dad’s stories, I’m happy to post them on my substack. Just ask. Otherwise, a few can be found on his website: https://sidneyhoman.com/a-fish-in-the-moonlight/

Let Stories (and your audience) Get Their Bearings

I worked on a lot of the Coruscant cinematics, as well as serving as the writer for the level itself. There was a lot happening -- catching up with Cal years after his adventures in Jedi Fallen Order. We come back to Cal’s story to discover that he’s been captured by the Coruscant Security Force, which turns out to be Cal’s crew. They’ve been working for Saw Gerrera for the past few years, and in the meantime the Mantis crew was scattered to the four winds. Soon we’ll meet Senator Sejan, who thinks he’s meeting to purchase Cal. And after all that, when Cal reveals that the exchange is a trick to get access to the Senator’s Imperial intel, we’ll meet Bode Akuna, the newest member of the crew.

That is a lot of story to cover, backstory, new characters -- some of whom won’t make it out of Coruscant alive. At first, a writer’s instinct might be to cram as much dialog in as possible. But an audience can only take in so much, and a lot of game writing is figuring out what to tell, what to show, and where to do it. You can get all this info, but while much of it is in cinematics and crit path gameplay, some of it is off the beaten path in echoes or databank entries, or in hub conversations. In any medium, storytelling space is at a premium. But there’s a value to the space in between explicit storytelling, and for the sake of your audience, you have to maintain that.

It’s Okay for your characters to state what they want

I think that sometimes, we writers try to get a bit clever, and write subtle characters and nuance. Maybe it’s because we think it feels oafish for characters to say what they want, but sometimes that’s the wrong instinct. The Coruscant opening has a lot of masters, but one of them (and this is true with most stories), is to establish what’s at stake for the characters. What matters to the protagonists (and sometimes villains). When Senator Sejan presides over Cal, he holds up his lightsaber and says, “To think one day our children will ask, what is this thing? This relic of a corrupt institution destroyed by its own arrogance.”

Very much at stake in Cal’s story is that he feels like he’s one of the last ones fighting to uphold the principles of the Jedi Order -- which Sejan states is the problem. The Republic was corrupt. Later, when Cal catches up to the senator on his yacht, he’ll hold up his lightsaber and say, “When your children see this, they’ll know that the Jedi never stopped fighting for them.” Jedi Survivor is about Cal struggling with who he’s fighting for, whether that fight is worth it -- and ultimately he finds someone to fight for. The Hidden Path. Point is, it’s okay to be this clear with your characters. There’s plenty of time for nuance on the why, but it’s helpful and powerful to bring your audience into the core things your characters fight for.

Small Parts, Big World Building

A LOT of work goes into building a hub, and Pyloon’s saloon (and the surrounding Rambler’s Reach) was no exception. Not just writing, implementation, gestures, timing passes, you name it. Often, people ask why we spend time on hubs and scans and echoes and other side content. Especially when most players don’t engage in these narrative delivery devices. Heck, I’m not the type of player to talk to every single person in a hub. And that’s okay. For the players that love this sort of thing, hey I see you and we work our tails off to make sure each one of these interactions is worth your time.

But for those who don’t, I think there’s still an impact. This side content is a writer’s opportunity to demonstrate that the world exists, that we’ve explored more facets than just what the protagonist is doing. This isn’t the Truman show. These characters exist outside your experience, and they grow and change when you’re not looking. This is also the type of storytelling content that feeds amazing conversations on forums -- it’s the type of thing you debate with your friend, or point out if they missed. For example, Tulakt, our pseudo soothsayer, predicts a lot of Cal’s fate, if you’re paying attention. You can learn a bit more about Turgle if you scour Rambler’s Reach for echoes of his past and how he came to Koboh. And even if you never learned this stuff, they exist, which gives the world a sense of fullness.

Listen to Your Malcontents

Long live the malcontents! Rayvis, Turgle, and Moran are three of the characters I wrote a lot of, and they were some of the most useful characters for our game’s story. Why? They’re able to point out Cal’s flaws in a way no one else can. I’ll never forget being on set when we shot the scene where Cal finally confronts Rayvis. Our director was talking through the script with the actors and got to the point where Rayvis says, “Without a code, you can only serve yourself.” For our director, this was the line that made Rayvis click as a character. Me too! And I wrote that line.

When I was first assigned a batch of scripts with Rayvis (excluding the scene where Cal first meets him outside of Pyloon’s saloon), truthfully I wasn’t sure what Rayvis was about. I entered the project just as the first batch of scripts were being shot, so a lot of those first months were learning about the story, its character arcs, etc. But I had a hard time understanding Rayvis, who had been searching for Dagan Gera ever since the Gen’dai escaped the Citadel. Without a code, you can only serve yourself turns out to be one of the themes of Survivor. Cal struggles to uphold the tradition of the Order in a galaxy who’s nearly forgotten the Jedi. Bode, Cal’s seeming friend, ends up betraying everyone because all he cares about is protecting his daughter. And only a character like Rayvis can get away with such a direct line.

Beyond Rayvis, I always look to the malcontents to help me locate the major character flaws and turns. Turgle is selfishness incarnate -- the epitome of a trouble causing, no-code malcontent that Cal, as Jedi, must protect even if the frog doesn’t deserve it. Moran, the bar drunk, wallowing away his sorrows and past misfortunes, seems completely devoid of hope -- and marvels as to why Cal would bother to save Turgle, let alone do anything for anyone. In life, we say that you should listen to your friends and family in times of trouble, but in stories - malcontents are much more valuable for a writer. They will help you locate your protagonist’s weaknesses.

Swing for the Fences when you Can.

I already wrote at length about Ghost Star, the song I wrote that Kata sings near the end of Jedi Survivor. But so many years later, I marvel that it almost didn’t come together. I wrote the song during a performance capture session, recording the scratch track during our professional recording, and got it recorded during pick-ups (near the finish line). You shouldn’t swing for the fences all the time, or else your dialog will sound like a bunch of hallmark cards. But the longer you tell stories, the better of a sense you’ll get for when you need to. More on this decision here (article link).

The Bode Echoes and End Game Content:

I rarely play post game -- it’s rare that I even finish a game these days, as I’m notoriously not a completionist. But I wrote a lot of the end game content for Survivor, and I think I was motivated to do so because of Kata. At the end of Survivor, her father’s dead and she finds herself among strangers. On some level, I didn’t want to just leave her alone. So we wrote extra planet hops and cantina conversations to help show the grieving process, since players would have spent so little time with her, and it didn’t seem fair to leave her in such a state without the ability to express what she was going through.

The lesson here for me was that if you take storytelling as seriously as I do, and if your goal is to move your audience, you have to approach writing in this way. You might not always give an audience what they want, but you must always treat them, and their emotions, with sensitivity and respect. We wanted people to grieve over Bode’s death, even after everything he did. So I wrote a series of echoes showing Bode’s struggle, his genuine friendship and love for Cal, and what ultimately led to his betrayal.

Wrapping Up

Survivor was one of the most challenging and engaging projects of my career so far. Links to some of the other articles here, and if you’ve got any questions about the game, ask in the comments below. May the Fourth be with you!

Hope is a Droid - https://dannyhoman.substack.com/p/hope-is-a-droid-bd-1-in-star-wars

Dissecting Turgle - https://dannyhoman.substack.com/p/dissecting-turgle-the-irrepressible

Don’t Wake the Dreamers - https://dannyhoman.substack.com/p/dont-wake-the-dreamers

Choice, and the freedom it offers players, is an essential tool in games. But as a writer of primarily linear storytelling experience, I’ve often felt that we gloss over the cost of choice. The common wisdom seems to be that it’s inherently good. The more choice, the better. If you’re not taking full advantage of every unique tool your medium has at its disposal, you are making a less unique experience.

Sometimes, the more choice and freedom I have in a game, the less emotionally invested I become in the experience. It always starts well, a choice here, the ability to tackle a handful of dungeons in any order there. It feels liberating. But at a certain point, I’m not really thinking about roleplaying a character anymore. While sometimes choices and freedom lead to a certain type of immersion, there is always a cost, and those costs add up.

So I want to talk about immersion in games, what breaks immersion for me (and maybe you). I think developers should be using choice and freedom as tools to get to a deeper level of immersion. Because right now it feels like in video games, choice gets the credit. Immersion does the work.

What’s in a Choice?

There are a lot of types of choices in games, but there are two I’m most interested in exploring.

• Player freedom is the ability to go wherever you want — more typical of open-world games versus a more linear progression.

• Player choice is the ability to decide the outcome of events or characters — your own or others — in a story.

People who’ve studied the psychology of choice in games would probably tell you that the more decisions a player makes, the more invested they are in the experience. But there’s a difference between attention investment and emotional investment — and emotional investment is what I’m always chasing for my audience.

Maybe you’re like me. I rarely get swept up in games whose primary experience is to tell me, the player, that I get to choose what happens, and in what order. The more control I have over a story, the less emotionally invested I am. As those choices add up, I often find myself not really thinking about the character I’m roleplaying anymore — I’m thinking about what I get as a result of those choices. Choice becomes transactional. At that point, what I’m playing becomes a game, with rules and win/loss conditions, instead of an interactive experience whose goal is to tell an immersive story. You’ve woken the dreamers.

One of the worst mistakes you can make in storytelling is to telegraph a character turn or plot twist. As a writer in any medium, you have to be able to predict — almost mind-read — where your audience is at any given moment, so you can surprise and delight them with something they didn’t see coming. That’s why choices often bring my experience to a halt, because they signpost that something is about to change based on a decision. Sometimes you want this clarity — Clementine will remember that. If your game is about balancing relationships, it’s good feedback. But most of the time, I want my stories to be surprising, and choices often get in the way of that goal.

Even in the storytelling-focused games that offer choices and branching paths, true freedom of choice is still an illusion. In my last article, Don’t Wake the Dreamers, I explored this briefly — how most games don’t really give you the freedom they seem to be offering. You’re still being guided. Your guide is just (mostly) invisible.

The Value of Becoming Someone Else

It can be fun to craft your own character, but often I don’t want to be myself. One of the most beautiful things about a great story is that it transports you somewhere else — so that for a little while, you aren’t you. So much of the DNA of games comes from D&D, but anytime I played, I always tried to choose a character who was very different from myself. Why? It forced me to see the world I was inhabiting from a different perspective.

Experiencing a story across any medium is a partnership, whether it be novel, comic, TV show, movie, or games. The difference is the rules of the type of relationship. What I’ve always found fascinating about games is that your role is active. The story continues only if you choose to keep playing, but if you choose, you become complicit. The story becomes partly yours not because you chose its direction, but because you lived it.

The first game that ever really hit me like this is Final Fantasy IV, where you take on the role of Cecil, a dark knight working for the King of Baron. After stealing a crystal from a rival kingdom, Cecil begins to question the morality of his orders. He lets this doubt slip in front of his King and is given a task to prove himself — deliver a package to the summoner village of Mist. Dutifully, you set off with your friend, Kain, only to find out upon delivery that the package is a bomb.

As a kid, realizing that I had destroyed a town was bad enough. But then you’re confronted by a child, Rydia, whose mother you’ve killed. Eventually you take her in, wracked with guilt — and Cecil’s journey becomes making amends for his past choices. But notice, not a single player choice, other than to accept my role and become someone new. Never underestimate the power of linear storytelling.

The Tightrope of Storytelling in Linear Games

Sometimes I envy game writers who get to offer multiple choices for their characters. What’s so challenging about linear video game storytelling is that you’re walking the tightrope that linear media walks — making difficult choices for a character while not losing your audience. In games this is a bit more challenging, however. I will watch a show about a science teacher turned drug dealer, but most of us don’t want to be monsters, at least not for too long.

The relationship between player and their character is different, more intimate — because you have to act. A few games buck this, like The Last of Us Part II, but most don’t. Why? To appeal to a wider audience, game storytellers often sacrifice the kinds of characters who might alienate players — trading edge for immersion. Does this lead to bland characters who refuse to make distinct choices? Absolutely. Thus the tightrope.

How bold can you be with a character you’re asking a general audience to embrace? Would players roleplay an unsympathetic character? For how long? In a choice-based game, you often get the option to be terrible or selfish. Not often in a linear game. Game writers trade character choices for a different sort of immersion — but this does have its drawbacks.

But if you’re not asking your audience to embrace a single character, possibilities open up. To me, no game has better captured multi-character storytelling than Final Fantasy VI — which also happens to be a game that marries linear character-driven storytelling with choice in a way that I don’t see very often, and one that ultimately takes advantage of choice and freedom in a way that few can match.

The White Whale — Choices Based on Immersion, Not a Prompt

Sometimes the best choices in games aren’t explicit choices at all. The implicit ones — the choices a game never announces — offer the highest level of immersion.

One of the best examples I can point to comes from Final Fantasy VI. In the first scenario, you and your party are tracking down Kefka — the mad jester who’s assassinated Emperor Gestahl and is attempting to seize the full power of the Espers on a floating continent. You find him, you defeat him. And in that defeat, the continent begins to break apart.

One of your party members, Shadow — easily the most mysterious character in the game — tells you he’ll hold things together as long as he can while you escape on your airship. You’re given a countdown timer. Three minutes, I believe. You fight your way back to the airship, and you’re given a single prompt. Ready to go? Yes or not yet.

If you weren’t thinking about Shadow, you say yes immediately. You leave. And thus ends the first half of the game. But if you wait, if you linger in those final moments, Shadow will appear. Leave too early, and Shadow is never a party member again. Wait — give your party member every last second to make it out — and you’re rewarded in the second half of the game.

Here’s the important thing. The game never tells you to wait for any specific reason. It never hints that something good might come from it. It’s simply checking whether you thought of Shadow as a person — or as a piece of the game you were done with. Based on your level of immersion, you choose either to leave or to wait.

Here’s a bonus example from the same game. Spoiler, Kefka, the bad guy, destroys the world — talk about bold storytelling! You wake up in control of Celes — the magitek soldier — on a desert island, alongside Cid, the creator of magitek. Cid is sick. He’s hungry. And what happens to him next is entirely up to you.

To feed him, you can go fishing. Some fish are slow and some are fast. The fast ones are the ones that will actually nourish Cid — and the game drops subtle hints in the dialogue that your catch matters. There’s no quest marker. No tooltip. No explicit reward flagged. But if you’re actually thinking about Cid as a person you care about, you’ll try harder. You’ll fish better.

Cid has no significant impact on the rest of the game either way. The story continues regardless. But that’s almost the point — this isn’t about mechanical reward. It’s about whether you were present. Whether you were roleplaying, or just playing. These two moments — Shadow on the collapsing continent, Cid on the island — represent something games are uniquely capable of: checking the quality of your emotional investment without ever asking for it directly. My entire career, I will be chasing the feeling both these moments had on me.

Just a Good Story

There’s something essentially human about being told a story. And what I love about games is that, like an actor accepting a role, you get to be a part of that story even if you’re not fundamentally changing it. It’s your role as player — the act of showing up, of inhabiting that world — that allows you to invest psychologically and emotionally in a game’s story.

I’ve been playing guitar and piano my entire life, and I think storytelling is a lot like music. You find patterns that work, and then you subvert them. You take your listener along for the ride — but the whole time, what you’re really trying to do is move them. A song doesn’t ask for your input. Its goal is to sweep you away. This is the value, to me, of linear storytelling in games. Sometimes we just want to hear a good story. With games, you get to take part in one.

But I do wish that more games experimented with choice like Final Fantasy VI - seeing it less as a mechanic and more a tool of immersion.

The best games don’t ask. They invite.

It’s the questions behind the question that kills me. Is a writer valuable in the games industry? Are we respected? Is what we do ‘real’ as opposed to making a character model or designing a boss?

Yes, but the answer is complicated.

Think Like a Storyteller, Not Just a Writer

In my 20s, I thought being a writer was enough. But then again, I was working on novels while trying to make ends meet, and novels are a largely solitary business. Video games are another matter. When I decided to pivot into games, I suspected that although I’d never been a practicing artist, designer, or coder, understanding those disciplines would be invaluable.

I’ll probably never be able to make a video game entirely on my own, but at the time I put together enough of a small demo to show people I understood the fundamentals. And writing essentially a spec game in a popular franchise was a point of commonality. At the time, most people had heard of The Walking Dead, and enough people were curious about my take on it.

Sidenote: This article is about AAA, but if you’re in the indie space, having a diverse skillset is even more important — so you can contribute as much as you can, especially with a small team. I’m a writer by trade, but I’ve done level design and narrative design, including implementation. Marketing materials. And I’ve done LLC taxes. Gross.

But if your goal is AAA, it’s healthy to think of yourself less as a writer and more as a storyteller — then ask yourself what tools you can acquire to help you tell those stories better. Even if it’s just being able to sketch a rough top-down layout for a mission, or so you can weigh in more intelligently when a concept artist shows you something.

Regardless of whether you’re in the indie space or AAA, speaking someone else’s discipline’s language not only demonstrates expertise but builds trust. It shows you’re interested in and care about someone else’s passion.

Of course, in any entertainment industry, there are two sides to landing that first job: being able to demonstrate enough skill for someone to take a chance on you — and getting that chance in the first place.

Don’t Chase Social Media — Build Real Connections

You can read all about my journey into the games industry in my first article, but briefly: I had a terrible 30th birthday. I was broke. I played some of my old Super Nintendo games at my parents’ place. I decided to pivot into video games and threw myself in hard. I played games not for fun but to understand how their storytelling worked. I made the game I could — a side chapter of Telltale’s The Walking Dead — and I reached out to anyone in the industry who’d respond.

That’s one positive about the game industry that still holds. Games are part of the entertainment industry, though it doesn’t feel like it. Even in 2026, the industry still feels approachable. I still respond to almost every single message I get. The only messages I don’t reply to either ask about something I can’t answer — like the game I’m working on — or come from someone who clearly doesn’t know who I am, asking general questions instead of specific ones.

If a person has done their homework — looked up who I am, checked whether I’ve already put out resources that might answer their question — I always respond. Because when I was trying to break in, that’s what I did. And people almost always responded.

I’ll tell you something I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t spend all my time chasing social media followings unless that was truly my passion. Being an entertainer and being a writer are related skillsets, but they’re not the same thing, and they train you to view storytelling in different ways.

People who pursue social media as a job build entrepreneurial skills, which is great — but I do find that when they step into a storytelling role, how they craft stories feels a bit skewed. Their instincts tend to be based on algorithms and not on core storytelling craft. They go for punchy, easily understandable story beats instead of building something that can hold attention over a sustained length of time. Writing a game is like putting together a long season of television or several movies.

That said, it is true that people with social media pull do have better connections and better access, regardless of the industry. Sometimes I worry that through social media incentives, we’re creating a generation of entrepreneurs instead of a generation of writers. I don’t like that the people who game the algorithms are the ones who get popular and famous and get all the access. I think about all the aspiring writers who don’t live and breathe social media who have incredible stories to tell.

If I were just starting out, I’d spend my time acquiring game dev skills over social media. I have never hired someone just because they had a big social media following. In fact, I’d think twice about hiring someone for that reason alone.

Drafting Your Future

It’s hard to predict where AI will go, and how it will affect game writing. Someday, I’ll devote a piece to exploring it on its own, but what I do worry about is AI making it harder for entry-level writers to find jobs. But there’s no sugar-coating it. It’s a scary time right now in the game industry.

I’ve always believed that the more games out there, the better, but with AI, all bets are off. If thousands of more games are entering the market, how will we distinguish quality from slop? To me, this will make narrative and story even more important to a game’s success. Mechanics are easy to replicate. Stories, not so much.

Ten years ago, when I told people I was a writer in the games industry, they’d assume I meant I was a coder. Who would’ve thought programmers would be the first profession truly endangered by AI? Who knows? These days, maybe it’s not so bad being just a writer.

Until you aren’t. Sometimes a story goes the way you don’t expect (or want). A character makes a decision you don’t feel was earned, or the story takes a leap you weren’t ready for or don’t buy. And then what happens? The logical side of your brain turns on, and you start interrogating and doubting everything that follows. You’ve woken the dreamers.

I felt this when I was playing Metroid Prime 4. It’s not a bad game. In fact, parts of it are wonderful, including its world building, which made it a little heartbreaking when certain choices woke me up from the fantasy of being Samus Aran, bounty hunter. And it got me thinking.

Every story has a fantasy, a dream that is part storyteller, and part audience. I don’t want our audience to think about logic or plot points or world building details. In games especially, depending on the player’s relationship to the character they’re playing, there are various pitfalls developers can fall into – all depending on the game’s core promise or fantasy.

You are the Character

First, let’s start with one end of the spectrum: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. This is a game in which we invite — and hope — that the player will become Cal Kestis. This is reflected in the way we tell Cal’s story, and how we don’t. For example, there are very few, if any, choices or options for the player to select dialogue. The few choices we have don’t impact Cal’s core character or move the world. They’re opportunities for player curiosity – deepening your (and Cal’s) understanding of a topic, or for flavor – to invite the player to make a decision for/with Cal, encouraging them to further roleplay.

We pour all of our energy into making you feel like you are Cal Kestis. The advantage of a game story like this is that we have a focused goal when it comes to the player and their relationship to Cal. At every moment, we want you to feel like you’re Cal. In every piece of dialogue, we want you to see how he sees the galaxy, and how the galaxy sees him.

The pitfall of this type of storytelling experience is when there’s a gap between Cal onscreen, and the player. If you don’t understand a decision Cal’s made, or a decision feels like it doesn’t really map to how you understand his character — you might wake up.

The opening of Jedi Survivor is one where I think the story and plot twist, however cool, does fight against helping the player become Cal. In the opening moments, you see Cal being led by Coruscant Security Force agents down into the underworld to be sold to a crooked senator. But you, the player, aren’t aware of what’s really going on. The CSF agents are Cal’s friends, and they’re running a con job against the senator. But the player only learns this several minutes into the game, after a gameplay section where you’re led to the meeting point.

Up until you’re handed over to the senator, you might suspect that something’s not right. But it’s not until the following cinematic where BD breaks Cal out of his binders that it’s revealed what’s really happening. The rest of the Coruscant mission is designed to ease the player back into the role of Cal. Fortunately we have the newcomer Bode, eager to learn about the Jedi. But it was a risk.

I think players didn’t ding us for pulling the wool over their eyes because at the end of the day, this happens at the beginning of the story. You’re not Cal yet, and it’s a fun opening. But later on in the story, this might not have gone so well. In fact, we only break character POV once more, when the player briefly takes on the role of Cere Junda, and even that is arguably still Cal’s experience via psychometry. Development teams sometimes make decisions that go against a core fantasy. It’s not an all or nothing situation. You just have to be careful not to do it too often.

You Make the Character

A lot of games invite the player to co-create a character through their own decisions. Choice-rich games like Fallout, Avowed, or Baldur’s Gate 3 invite the player to collaborate with the storyteller, shaping characters based on various decisions. The richness of this storytelling genre in games is the opportunity to express yourself, to make a character your own. You decide, to varying degrees, how your character reacts to the world — and how the world reacts to you.

I love these sorts of role-playing games, and I highly respect that people are able to write these. Because whereas with Survivor we’re making singular decisions about the story and writing them to be polished and engaging, in something like Baldur’s Gate 3 you’ve got multiple paths that all have to feel whole and complete. Obviously, the opportunity of games like this is player expression and player freedom, allowing you a different type of immersion than is possible in a linear narrative.

So what wakes a player in this type of dream? I think it’s largely the impact of your choices. We’ve all had that experience before when you start to feel like choices don’t matter, or the choices you’ve made don’t map to what you expected them to – or end up with an opposite result. Or a decision that doesn’t end up mattering, which can feel like a betrayal of this compact, this conspiracy, this shared dream between storyteller and player.

I don’t have a single example of where this type of fantasy goes wrong -- at it best (Baldur’s Gate 3), there’s so much content and so many opportunities for to steer the story and its characters that my mind accepts that not everything is in my control. And I accept that storytellers in choice-based narratives must way presenting a choice in a way that feels fair while still maintaining the right as storyteller to not telegraph the outcome. In the end, I decide that I have enough control to stay with the fantasy. But when it fails, I feel betrayed.

I feel this most acutely in the horror/survival themed choice-based game, because their fantasy hinges upon life or death. In the best versions like Until Dawn, the choices I’m making seem fair enough, even if I’m not sure where they’ll lead. But in its follow-up, The Quarry (still good with some great characters and worth playing), there were times where the scene would go the opposite way from what I intended with a decision, or I decided not to do something (or shoot something) for a reason, only for the story to veer in the exact opposite direction I expected. And when a fantasy is based upon who lives and who dies, those decisions – and the choice architecture that presents those decisions – really matter.

This has always been one of the meta-challenges of the choice-based game genre – and even the very best examples of these games end up disappointing some players. Because how do you make a player’s choices matter without creating infinite content? Some people think that A.I will solve this problem, creating infinite choices and results. Maybe it will. But that will be a different dream, a different compact. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Maybe we’ll find out.

You are the Visor

Then there are games where the protagonist you embody isn’t so much a defined character as a cypher, a stand-in, an invitation to see the world through someone else’s eyes – and yet still your own. These sorts of fantasies have different story and experience goals, and in many ways, they’re the most traditional way players experience a game’s narrative, focusing more on the world and tone and background lore than specific character motivations or plot points.

I love these games. I’ve been playing them since I was a kid. In some ways, games without explicit stories feel less at risk from waking dreamers than the previous game types I’ve outlined, and that’s what makes Metroid Prime 4’s experimentation with NPCs and dialogue so fascinating to me.

Caveat – this is not intended to be a takedown of the devs who worked on Metroid Prime 4. There are beautiful moments to this game where I was lost in the world these developers had created. And lord knows that game writers are often at the mercy of higher powers. But in the end, the choice to include NPCs in this way feels counter to the franchise’s central fantasy.

I’ve been playing Metroid games for 30 years now. To me, the best Metroid experiences aren’t about Samus the character. She’s a vector for me, the player, to experience an alien world. She’s a stranger in a strange land. And not just any land. Most of the time, Samus is walking through an alien graveyard. So it always made sense that Samus didn’t speak. In a cemetery, you speak in hushed voices – or not at all.

Does that mean that there couldn’t be a Metroid game with well-defined NPCs? No. But I think it was a difficult thing to land, with high stakes that unfortunately didn’t pay off for me. It’s not just the fan-boyish Myles MacKenzie. It’s the sense that at any time – when I’m cruising around a desert wasteland or exploring an iced-in, abandoned facility, someone can pierce that dream, reach out and shatter my experience with a reminder when I least expect it – or want it.

I think there was a way to have NPCs work in a Metroid game, but I don’t think comms is a tool I would use. Keep in mind, comms aren’t a tool most game writers like using, but they’re a production-flexible way to get more story into a game. Save the NPC interactions for something more akin to a FromSoft game – which similarly prioritizes tone and world above plot and character. Paramount to a Metroid game is knowing that you can wander that alien landscape at your own pace, taking in bits of lore with scans, marveling at ancient factories and wonders — too important to risk being dispelled by comms. If your world’s a cemetery, don’t shout.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes I think people underestimate the relationship between the gamer and the developer. It’s different than linear media and is built on mutual respect and trust. This relationship extends from the game’s design to the narrative, where we invite the player to be a part of a story — often in the role of the main character. This is what makes it a shared dream. Storyteller and player. One can’t exist without the other. But you have to know what fantasy you’re going for and do your best not to dispel that fantasy. Don’t undercut it. Don’t wake the dreamers.

I think there are -- and a lot of it can be seen in all the little details that made Fallout a successful TV adaptation. These details are reflective in two aspects of game development:

• The interactive demands of creating a game world

• The unique collaborative process required to make an interactive space 

World Building for Invested Players

Players are the raptors testing the cage—they'll go anywhere you let them, and especially places you don't want them to. This unpredictability adds a strange dimension to world-building, making it one of the most challenging yet rewarding aspects of game development. You have to put content everywhere.

Even with invisible walls or gated areas, the freedom players have to explore these worlds is staggering. Developers know this and delight in cramming every nook and cranny with intricate details. This requires fleshing out the world more fully than linear media often demands.

In a screenplay, you can suggest the essence of a setting without providing the details to back it up and make it believable. Not so in an open game world. In Jedi Survivor - we wrote hundreds of pages of bonus dialogue accounting for when players veer from the golden path and interact with characters across different scenarios. Wanna know about how Turgle came to Koboh? It's there. Gulu and Gido's first date? Start exploring. 

When I wrote for Borderlands, we used echo logs to build out our planets, giving spotlights to side characters. Hell, the Typhon De Leon echos basically tell the history of the discovery of the first Vault on Promethea through Nekrotafeyo. We're talking 50 or so pages of scripts that found their way into off-the-beaten-path echoes. 

Much will go unseen, but some will find it. That's the pleasure and sorrow of being a game writer. You're writing for a variety of players, some of who will never veer from the golden path. But many will. And so you have to consider the full breadth of a world, its history and its characters. 

This extends beyond pure writing --  devs across disciplines layer in subtle world-building elements - art, design, narrative - ensuring a consistent, richly immersive experience throughout your world. Which brings us back to that iconography and signage in Fallout, which world-builds while directing the player through the environment.

And  all this meticulous foundational work proves invaluable for potential adaptations. The heavy lifting on setting, costuming, locations has already been explored from multiple angles and multiple disciplines, giving would-be TV and Film adapters an embarrassment of riches to choose from.

Deeper Worlds Through Iterative Collaboration

I'd hazard a guess that there aren't other mediums where so many different disciplines come together to build a world, with the exception of theme park design. Game worlds are often massive -- too big for any one person to make all the creative calls. Because of this, the approach to decision-making many game studios take mirrors a dynamic startup, with a willingness to experiment and iterate rapidly.

Does this sound chaotic? It is. We spend a lot of time in meetings and then in playthroughs, where  I'll see new details in an environment. Sometimes these additions surprise and delight me. Sometimes it's terrifying. You put that THERE? But for better or worse, a lot of the collaboration in games comes when you see it all working together in a level. It's part of game dev culture to get content in a game quickly, lending generally to a looser creative process.

On any given day in game development, I'm talking to sound designers, level designers, concept artists, narrative designers about details that make up an interactive world. What a character should be wearing. The environment where the player would find them. Whether it's raining or sunny. Every discipline views world building differently.

While this isn't true at all game studios -- there are definitely some that do top-down decision-making -- even then there's so much to build in tandem that no single person can completely define an interactive world. Harmonizing so many creative voices has its challenges, but when it works, you've got a bunch of amazing creative minds each lending their perspective and expertise to creating a unique, interactive experience. And it's all the product of iterative world building and teamwork.

The Indie Game Gold Rush

While every medium presents unique obstacles and opportunities, the dynamic, deeply collaborative approach to worldbuilding in game dev is a core strength of TV/Film adaptations.

I've been thinking a lot about where TV/Film adaptations in the indie sphere offer a bounty of fresh perspectives. As Hollywood has likely optioned most major game IPs, I expect they'll increasingly mine the indie realm for standouts like Inscription and Dave the Diver - offbeat worlds even AAA rarely explores. And even games that don't have explicit stories are ripe for adaptation. Strange kids cartoon set in the world of Animal Well? Yes please!

• Many people don’t play games for story, meaning game writers can’t assume universal interest in the game’s story and must write for multiple audiences.

• In no other media does a writer serve more roles than in a video game, meaning story often is secondary to other responsibilities.

I want to focus on the second point — the multiple responsibilities of game writers, things that aren’t directly about telling a story or creating a character — and how these responsibilities add value to the player experience and game at large. Then, I want to take a wider look at other values writers bring to game development and franchise development.

Let’s start with:

Making the Old Feel New Again

Games are repetitive.

It’s not a dig. Repetition is simply part of game development, as there are only so many ways a player can interact in a game, which are called mechanics. The problem is, a game’s mechanics are inherently limited – thus repetition. For example, in your average AAA action game, you can do a smattering of the following: explore, interact with stuff, fight enemies, hide, hack computer consoles, and so on.

Sometimes, you’ll hear these referred to as the verbs.

Most games introduce players to a set of mechanics, and then remix and reimagine how those mechanics are used in various combinations. By the end of a game, you’ve attained a certain level of mastery over these mechanics that feels empowering.

But here’s the rub. Coming up with a completely new game mechanic is incredibly difficult, which is why most games share a majority of common mechanics. Sometimes, a game will come along and introduce a marquee mechanic – for example, the wall running in Mirror’s Edge, which was later used in Titanfall. 

Imagine sitting down to write a story, and someone tells you that you can only use ten verbs. That’s the challenge of game writing. But fortunately, there are some clever game writers out there who know how to squeeze meaning out of even the most seemingly rote of mechanics.

The best games mask repetitive mechanics by wrapping them in unique narrative in order to make the old feel new again. Enter the writer, who has two main roles with regard to repetition:

• Contextualize mechanics to leverage repetition, making a player’s actions grow in significance over the course of a game.

• Mask repetitive mechanics/systems by packaging them with new contexts/missions/fantasies to keep players invested.

Giving Repetition Weight Through Premise and Context

Writers help create player context, which can alter a player’s experience in a game, and how they perceive their actions.

In whatever media you write for, you try to leverage its strengths and shore up its weaknesses. A game writer’s goal is to take something repetitive and make it feel special. For example, how many times have you swung a melee weapon in a game? A thousand times.

Now, there are lots of things you can do to make that melee swing feel more special. You can make the weapon model look visually distinct, or add in sound effects and visual effects to give it weight and power. And if you’re a game writer, you can make the player feel like they’re wielding freaking Excalibur – instead of Prop Sword #25.

Two games that excel at this are God of War and Control.

In God of War, Kratos’ ax Leviathan makes you feel like a god. And you are. But what makes this weapon stand out is its history – Leviathan was given to Kratos by his late wife. Because the entire game is about you as Kratos taking your son Atreus on a pilgrimage to spread his mother’s ashes, the ax becomes the embodiment of this journey. Meaning whenever you swing Leviathan, your late wife is with you, helping out every step along the way.

Or consider the Service Weapon in Control. Yes, it’s got cool animation and feels good to shoot — but let’s face it, we’ve seen these types of guns before in plenty of games. So, what makes the Service Weapon feel special? The mythos of the firearm, and how it symbolizes your role as Director. It’s basically an Excalibur/Harry Potter wand that chooses you – that confirms that only you can defeat the Hiss. And in a game where you’ve got freaking supernatural powers, making an ordinary gun feel special is an amazing feat!

Point being, a shiny new context can make something repetitious feel significant, even mythic, and in doing so, reinforce the central themes of a game’s characters.

Same Set of Blocks, New Shapes

Most mission designers will tell you that the challenge isn’t in creating one engaging mission, it’s in creating the 50th mission that still feels fresh and exciting when you’re forty hours into a game. And the crazy part is that some games even manage to pull this off.

How?

Smart mission designers know they have to dangle something new in front of a player to keep them invested in the game. Of course, the low-hanging fruit is a shiny reward. Kill ten goblins. Get new sword. But bribing the player can only take you so far and really only works on a certain type of player. Sooner or later, players figure out that they’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

A writer’s challenge is to present a mission that feels different to the player, even if it uses all those same mechanics you’ve been using for hours. We do this by tapping into various fantasies, with the goal of repackaging them with a new context.

For example, consider the kill mission where you help a farmer seek revenge against a cow thief. It feels different from the kill mission where you hunt down a serial killer, because there are two separate fantasies at play.

Same blocks, new shapes

Creating Discourse through Choice and Character

Add player choice to the equation and you’ve got a whole different aspect of a writer’s value – the possibility of creating discussion outside the game.

Presenting players with interesting moral choices in games is, to me, one of the fundamental advantages of interactive media — I’m talking to you, Bloody Baron mission chain in The Witcher 3. I’m willing to bet that games that do this well end up increasing their franchise’s value, because player-led conversations on tough choices inevitably make their way to forums and other social media, and ultimately result in a more long-term success for the game.

Writers help architect and promise these types of conversations. No one writes a mission or character for them to be forgotten. When you think about what sustains a franchise from one game to the next, often it’s the fans who are most invested in a game’s characters. After all, it’s awfully challenging to cosplay a mechanic.

But if you create a stand-out moment or compelling character, fans will still be talking about it years later – when you’re set to release the next game.

Building Bridges and Franchise Development

The question then becomes: what makes players pick up the sequel?  Maybe it’s a newly introduced mechanic or twist on an old formula, but I’d argue that there’s a more powerful incentive. The opportunity to hop back into a familiar world.

The stronger your world, the longer players will want to spend time in it.

Writers are always trying to expand a game’s world. We do this because we enjoy world building. We like creating characters. We want to expose the mysteries of a world and unwrap them one by one, always creating new mysterious and unexplored corners of the world in the process.

No matter whether you’re making a game with missions or one of those newfangled battle royales or hero shooters, I’d argue that world building and character development are crucial for enticing players and retaining player.

Why is building a cohesive, fascinating world so important in these genres? Competition. Tons of it. New battle royales and hero shooters are springing up every day. Some have different mechanics or game modes, but you’re still doing mostly the same thing. This make the fantasy you’re offering to the player more important than ever.

Remember, you can’t copyright a mechanic, but you can own your world. 

Conclusion

Writers not only want the current world to be engaging and mysterious; they also always have their eye on new territory. By nature, we want to draw in players and keep them engaged from release to release, and season to season. It’s in our DNA.

One, final thought. You need writers from the outset of pre-production, when a game’s pillars are still being set. World building doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s a process of exploration and planning that can define the bounds of your game, its tone and characters, and how your world presents to players. It can also box in your franchise, if not done judiciously. But done well, a game world becomes your marketing. It sells your fantasy. It does the heavy lifting of marketing a game for you. So do yourself a favor — hire a few writers!

We consume books, TV, and film stories. Then when we turn on a video game, things are different. Certain storytelling conventions just don't seem to work the same way. And it's frustrating! Which leads some to say that games will never tell stories as well as other established media.

This sentiment is based on an assumption that games can and should tell stories like other non-interactive medium that have come before. Although I’ve played plenty of games whose stories have impacted me as strongly as any book, TV show, or movie, but here's the thing -- they impacted me in a different way, and for different reasons. Video games operates under another set of storytelling rules, with a host of limitations -- some easily apparent to most gamers, some not so much so. Interactive storytelling has its own set of invisible blockers, which come into effect the moment you press start.

Just Press Start

When you sit down to watch a TV show, it’s safe to assume that you want a story. That’s not necessarily the case with a game, even a story-centric game. Storytelling in games isn’t a prerequisite, and strictly speaking, a traditional story isn’t required to make an interesting game experience. Not everyone who plays a game wants to experience a story. To some, story gets in the way of gameplay. Others might feel that game stories simply don’t resonate like stories in other media. Even though I'm a professional game writer, sometimes I find myself skipping through dialogue.

The question is why? In non-interactive media, the only control we really have is whether we turn a movie on or off, fast forward, rewind, etc. We can reread a passage of a novel, or skip ahead. Pause a TV show while we get a drink. But that's pretty much it. We have no significant control over the story, and we accept these limitations because we've never known anything different. Tell us a story, writer. Go on. And if it's not engaging, we'll find something else to watch.

From the moment you press start on a game, you view story through a different set of assumptions. Games are about you. Depending on the game, you're the protagonist, director, cinematographer, costumer, and so on. You have control. And this control extends to the idea that in most games, you don't have to care about story. Fundamentally, this changes how we interpret a game's story -- because traditional storytelling is about the suspension of belief, about pacing, about story being delivered to you, instead of created with you as collaborator.

Even for those of us who do play a game to experience a story, it’s worth considering the types of obstacles that makes interactive stories difficult to write, obstacles that are often invisible to the average player.

The Ticking Clock

Some storytelling tools in traditional media don’t work as well in the interactive space. Take a common storytelling element: pacing. Games are player-driven, meaning the time between plot points can vary from five minutes to five hours, depending on where your player decides to go, and what activities they elect to take part in: side quests, additional content, screwing around with your friends, staring at a rock for forever.

All of this contributes to the player’s perception of how a story unfolds. One of the most beautiful aspects of games is that they don't need to be a linear experience. If you’re curious about what’s over the ridge, follow it, plot be damned!

While there are tools that help alleviate the pacing issue in games (for example, plot-reminders when you load up a game), often brute force repetition is required for clarity. When a Non-Player Character (NPC) tells you that a villain is going to do something for the fifth time, it’s often an attempt to split the difference between entertainment and plot clarity, and this can affect how the player perceives a game’s narrative.

Let’s get more specific with pacing -- the ticking clock.

This device often signals that a story is about to reach a crescendo, barreling the audience towards a dramatic conclusion. But a ticking clock can be difficult to implement in a game. If an NPC tells you, "the building is gonna explode, you’ve got to DO something!" they’re almost certainly lying. Unless you find yourself in the middle of a timed event, you can probably go save that dude’s dog first. Pacing is one of the reasons that game writers focus on creating engaging characters, but there are invisible obstacles to creating those, too.

Simulated Characters

Generally-speaking, game writers have more control over how a character speaks and acts than they do the plot the player follows. That’s because main plot is a collaboration between writers, mission designers, level designers, and pretty much everyone else on a development team. And a main plot needs to do more than simply tell a story. As a writer you support tutorialization of new game mechanics, for example. The best games fold these tutorials into pivotal story moments.

Yet even creating engaging character can be impacted by the types of resources a writer has to sell that character. Creating characters is more expensive than you might think!

Building an NPC, for example, requires concept, a 3D model, rigging (how a character moves) and animation (what movements an NPC is able to perform). Custom animations require additional work and resources. That’s one reason why we often see the most important dramatic scenes happen in cinematics. Yet most games use cinematics sparingly. As a general rule, designers try to avoid taking control away from the player. That means that the ability to sell a dramatic scene in-game often relies upon the animations needed to support the conversation. Or a scene must be written to sell character primarily on voice.

Try this. Go start an argument with your friend, but don’t move at all. Make sure to record the conversation. Or reserve yourself to a limited set of gestures. Then watch the video. See what I mean?

A lot of storytelling relies on the suspension of disbelief. Pacing helps with this – you can’t dwell on a plot hole in a movie if you’re swept up in the moment. But games are simulations. If the player wants to test the boundaries of a simulation, they're free to do so. And because games are about you, and the control you exert over the world, it's often fun to exert that control! Stare at an NPC long enough, and you’ll realize that they’re as scripted as a character in The Truman Show, repeating the same loop over and over.

Try this. Go outside and repeat the same actions on a one minute loop. Are your neighbors staring at you? Congratulations, now you know how an NPC feels!

Interactive Mindset 

So, what areas of storytelling can video games excel, or even exceed traditional media?

World-building. Games are character-filled theme parks where players often spend dozens, if not hundreds of hours. And perhaps as importantly, as a game writer you can allow players to choose for themselves how much of a game world they experience. Main plot. Side missions. Lore. Games have tons of room to build a world, as well as the mechanics to allow you to experience that world on your own terms, based on your interests, at your own pace.

Despite certain limitations, creating characters is another avenue where games have some important advantages. In a game, characters we meet can actually help us progress -- and help us feel more empowered as a result. When an NPC gives you a new ability or power, or helps you explore the world, it establishes a connection between you and that character that's wholly different from traditional media.

In the end, experiencing a game's story depends, in part, on your mindset. Sure, an NPC might loop animations from time to time. And it’s possible I’ll try to talk to them too much and exhaust their conversation. But just as I try not to pause a TV show or movie, I’ve taught myself to sink into the world of a game, rather than poke around for the seams. So if an NPC tells me the building is about to explode, I’ll take them at their word – and hope they forgive me if I stop to stare at a rock, or save that dude’s dog. 

But the invisible obstacles don’t stop there! In no other medium does a writer have to serve more roles than in a video game, juggling not only plot and character, but tutorials, new mechanics, unfolding systems, inherent repetition of player actions/missions, the list goes on. I’ll explore all this in the next article. Coming soon!

You can hear versions of "Ghost Star" in game, sung by both Tajinae Turner (Kata) and Noshir Dalal (Bode). If you enjoy the song, be sure to thank them for going the extra mile to make this song come to life. 

When we were in PCAP filming the final scenes of the game, there were times when Kata felt impossibly real on the stage. So did Kata's pain. I felt like she needed something to get through the dark times.

I wrote the lyrics first, a lullaby I imagined Kata's mother must've sung to her. I was influenced by a song my mother used to sing to me, Wynken, Blynken And Nod (originally a poem by Eugene Field). My mom always sung the Carly Simon version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgmKcbLJVxg

The first melodies I tried were in a major key. I sent them to our music team, who shared the incredible Tanalorr composition. From their influence, I switched Ghost Star to a minor key, eventually ending on the final melody. 

I recorded a scratch track with my guitar and sent it along to Tajinae Turner, who plays Kata, not knowing how it would turn out. We were so busy at that time, recording several VO sessions a day, that when hers arrived, I nearly forgot we'd asked her to sing this song.

She said she'd been practicing, and then in one amazing take, Tajinae recorded the beautiful, haunting version you can hear in the game. Several times, I almost abandoned the song. Glad I didn't. Kata needed it, she'd been through so much.

While characters like Turgle are really fun to write in the moment, they're difficult to pull off across an entire game. Why? Because ideally, characters grow over the course of a story, even if they just gain a new perspective. The question we asked in the writers room during development was — would Turgle change? Could Turgle change?

To plot out character growth, the writing team mapped out every macro state for the game. Macro states are basically the points that correspond to the acts in Jedi: Survivor, determined by both plot and tone. From there, we added substates within these acts where an important story beat or tangible tonal shift would occur.

We'd list every NPC in the cantina (and there are a lot of them), and brainstorm, character by character, how they might react to Cal’s story, and otherwise what they'd most likely want to talk to Cal about — we're talking hundreds and hundreds of pages of dialog to be revised, edited, and recorded.

With so many characters, we were always careful to weigh who was aware of the main story, or otherwise what else an NPC would have on their mind. It’s hard work, but seeing the reaction from players, it's absolutely worth it. Which brings us to Turgle. If Turgle changed — what would cause him to change, and how?

Would he become less of a coward? More honorable? Stop his endless scheming? Would he learn anything from Cal's heroic example? Would Turgle become a better frog? Would he aspire to become mayor of Rambler's Reach? Would he fight back against the Raiders? The Empire? Could Turgle become rebel #1? Nah!

Because Turgle's reactions swing so wildly, he's got the feel of a Looney Tunes character. In the end, it didn't feel right to give him a traditional character turn. The fun of Turgle is that he's deeply upset one moment, and arrogantly scheming the next. That said, he couldn't be ONLY a cartoon character. Turgle had to have some genuine emotions underpinning his wild mood swings.

Our challenge was figuring out the few moments where Turgle would flip over and reveal his frog underbelly. Which brings us to Richard’s question, mid-way through recording.

Spoilers below. Beware!

There are a few moments in our game where you get a window into Turgle's… dare I say… genuine side. One story moment occurs after a major plot point involving Turgle's raider nemesis, and if you're still reading this, it's the death of the Bedlam Raiders leader, Rayvis at the hands of Cal Kestis.

Turgle feels responsible for Rayvis’ death and attempts to drown his sorrows at the cantina. When Richard got to the conversation where Turgle confesses his guilt to Cal and he asked me whether this was genuine, or just Turgle being Turgle.

To me it was genuine — despite Turgle's slippery, scheming ways, he doesn’t want to do people actual harm. Even to those who attempt to kill him. There’s an echo you can find on Koboh that speaks to this, as well.

Aside from guilt, another moment that opens Turgle up as a character is an echo where you learn about Turgle's loneliness and social isolation. We added this near the end of development, along with another echo where unofficial town mayor Doma Dendra saves Turgle's hide, in order to give Turgle a bit of backstory to complicate his character.

In the end, we decided that one of Turgle's defining character traits would be something strangely admirable, especially given the state of the galaxy. No matter what happened to him, he would always bounce  back on his feet. Turgle is irrepressible.

You've got to respect a frog who suffers the slings and arrows and then tries to send aforementioned slings and arrows back to you.

At Respawn, there are always BD gifs flying about to lift our spirits. We also shot all of our performance capture cinematics (PCAP) during Covid. Shoots can be long and exhausting, and doubly so when you’re wearing a mask for 12 hours. But for every shoot, we had BD with us.

Gideon Emery plays BD. He's a delightful, mischievous actor who seemed to make it his mission to entertain the cast and crew, both on and off the PCAP stage.

But you might be wondering — why do we have an actor playing BD in the first place? BD's only lines are beeps and boops, right? To the writing team, BD is a main character — and on set you need to have an actor thinking through a character’s motivation in every scene, or else you might miss an opportunity.

On the PCAP stage, Gideon brings BD to life in two important ways. Using a nose whistle, Gideon provides on set beeps and boops, so our other actors can hear BD's reactions live. Our audio engineers go back later in post production, of course, but it’s incredibly useful to be able to haer BD react on set. When we write BD beeps in our scripts, we always provide the general intent of his reaction like this: 

CAL

I don't know, buddy. Something's off.

BD-1

(it’s okay!)

Boop!

Gideon, holding a replica of BD, would follow Cameron, playing Cal, around the set, whistling and providing reactions, some scripted, some not. This gave BD a presence as one of the crew, and an equal among the cast. 

Despite his diminutive stature, BD is one of the emotional cornerstones of Cal's journey. When writing scripts, we always talked through BD's reactions to crucial story beats. But many of BD's most charming, meaningful moments were the result of on set collaboration, and Gideon's keen eye as an actor.

For example, after the disastrous events on Coruscant, it's BD who shows Cal the home movie of the Mantis crew from better times. This spurs Cal and BD-1's journey to Koboh to track down Greez Dritus to get the Latero's help repairing the Mantis.

At Pyloon’s saloon, Greez immediately recognizes that the Jedi's fight against the Empire has taken its toll. Greez wisely suggests that Cal rest in the room he's prepared in the cantina basement. The next morning, Greez counsels Cal against losing himself in the fight.

At first Cal, stubborn, fixated on the Empire, deflects, and instead focuses on the task at hand — recovering the spare part for the Mantis. When we tried the scene in rehearsal, it went really smoothly until the end, when we sensed that we needed a beat to prompt Cal's final lines, which highlight the emotional core of the scene.

Cue Gideon, pitching that BD should hop off Cal's shoulder and force his friend to stop and reflect on Greez's counsel. We gave it a try, and it was just what we — and Cal — needed.

BD hops in front of Cal.

BD-1

(listen)

Boop!

Cal looks down at BD, his loyal companion, standing in the way. And in that moment Cal is finally able to really listen to Greez's counsel because he knows that BD and Greez are family, and sometimes family knows best.

CAL

Greez, I'll think about what you said. 

Video game development is a hilariously complicated endeavor. How dramatically a story can be shaped by time and resources still amazes me. As a game writer, you should be ready to solve production problems with creative story and character solutions. Reason being — it takes tons of developers working in tandem to create a new character or to put together a single mission.

At the end of the day, AAA video game storytelling is a co-op game, not a solo mission. And you’ll need some storytelling allies on your perilous journey.

Story Allies: Narrative Safety in Numbers

As in any successful co-op party, you’ll need allies of various skills and disciplines by your side. Here’s why:

1. Different storytelling perspectives strengthen how a game’s story is experienced by the player.

2. Each discipline has expertise in knowing how to use available resources to tell a story.

3. More story allies means a greater chance of success during the unpredictable game development journey.

Every story decision you want to make as a writer will require your fellow developers’ time and resources, whether that be a concept artist, animator, 3D modeler, programmer, designer — you name it. Each discipline has some effect on a game’s story and characters, and it’d take quite a few articles to cover them all. But on a day-to-day basis, my story allies almost always include concept artists, mission designers, and level designers.

Concept Artists — Visual Storytellers

Concept artists create first impressions.

If I want to pitch a new character, I almost always reach out to a concept artist first. I’ll send some quotes from the character, a short backstory, maybe some thoughts on what the character looks like. The concept artist will ask a few questions. Does the character have a pet? A tattoo? Where are they from? An hour later, a concept artist will have made an amazing piece of environmental art or character sketch. Concept artists create pure magic, and they’ve taught me a lot about creating characters.

But the most important lesson I’ve learned from working with concept artists is the power of a first impression. Even before your character opens his mouth to say his first carefully-crafted lines, his appearance will tell a player everything he needs to know. In the concept stage, all aspects of a character are explored.

• Shape language and silhouettes (the big read of a character)

• Costuming and accessories (clothing, gear and equipment)

• Personality (via facial expressions or posture)

Because a character’s visual design creates such a powerful first impression, staying in good communication with your concept artists is crucial. Otherwise, the poverty-stricken character you’re writing in secret might end up sporting a top hat. After a character starts down the production pipeline, it becomes more and more costly to change a character’s appearance. Usually, if something’s going to change later in production, it’s your dialogue.

Mission Designers — Interactive Storytellers

Mission designers wield the verbs.

A mission designer views story through the lens of a player’s actions, and how those actions advance the mission. Video game verbs are often seemingly limited, and usually include: go, interact, fight. It’s the context that makes those limited verbs interesting:

• Go to a fun house run by nuns (not a real thing, not part of Borderlands 3).

• Interact with a talking jukebox (ditto).

• Fight the guy who stole your sandwich (no promises, jk).

Mission designers are natural story advocates, though their focus is on a player’s moment by moment experience. Clarity is paramount to mission design. Reason being, if a player doesn’t understand what they’re being asked to do, the next question they’re liable to ask is why they should bother with it. Just as concept artists help a writer create the right first impression, mission designers work to sharpen motive in the interest of both entertainment and clarity.

It took me a long time to truly understand why mission designers are so invested in story. The reason is stupidly simple. A mission designer will play their mission more times than almost any other developer in the studio. They will labor over pacing and wording of every objective. That’s their job! But consider this. If that clever joke you tell that gets a laugh the first time, see how funny it is the tenth time. Or the hundredth.

 I try to get drinks with my mission designers as often as possible. It makes it easier when we come to blows later in the week about whether to cut a line or keep it. And in a medium where space is usually tight, a single line can sometimes make the difference between a vivid character and a forgettable one… so you’re gonna need all the space you can get…

Level Designers — Environmental Storytellers

Level designers determine the space.

Of course, they don’t do this in a vacuum. Level designers work with writers and mission designers to plot out story beats. I drop by my LDs’ desks from time to time to ask for a set piece, a blood trail, a crashed ship — any props I might need to sell a mission or character. Some level designers love storytelling, and some don’t. I say this only because, by nature, mission designers have to be invested in story to some degree. But level designers have other masters: exploration and combat. 

However, whether they want to be or not, level designers are natural environmental storytellers, because they’re most familiar with the art assets at their disposal to help you tell a story. I’ll come to a level designer and say, “I’d love something super foreboding.” Ten minutes later, you’ve got yourself a half-sandwich on a plate, lathered in blood. Story gold!

The potential conflict between a writer and a level designer often comes down to space, and it’s something I am constantly advocating for. A character needs time to share an amusing anecdote. I’ve got one more joke to squeeze into a mission. Without the proper space to tell your story, you either have to cut back or put the player in a slow-moving elevator, and no one wants that, right? Right? Right…

Cooperative Storytelling

A richer character backstory can enhance the significance of a mission. An extra line here or there might turn a rote fetch quest into something special. That’s what I believe, anyway. Day by day, I roam the office forming story alliances, hoping to recruit my fellow developers to invest their time and resources in the pursuit of memorable characters or unforgettable missions. Fortunately, my fellow developers at Gearbox appreciate how a game’s narrative elements enrich a player’s experience. But as a game writer, you can’t do it alone. Nor should you. So choose your allies wisely!

The path to becoming a video game writer is tough — and the path to landing a job is different for everyone. But in case it helps, here’s how I got started. My video game career began after a hilariously bad birthday.

The Bad Birthday Pivot

My girlfriend and I had recently come back to the States from Japan after the Tsunami of 2011. I’d left a soon-to-be amazing teaching job in Tokyo, the type of gig an aspiring novelist dreams of: short hours, great pay, plenty of time to write on the side. But with my family’s concerns over the Fukushima situation, we came home instead (blowing much of my savings in the process) to Florida to crash with my parents. The plan was to recoup a bit and then figure out next steps. Then my girlfriend and I broke up, a week before my birthday. So, to review: Recent break-up. Unemployed. No savings. Living with parents.

On the morning of my birthday, I dug through my closet, found our Super Nintendo, and fired up Chrono Trigger. Alongside the novels I’d read that shaped the type of novelist I wanted to be, video games had also impacted my imagination and sense of story, games like Final Fantasy IV and VI, and of course, Chrono Trigger. 

While I was playing, my mind drifted to my writing career, and how I wanted to be a working writer — that is, I wanted to pay the bills with my writing, rather than my writing being a “when I’ve got time” situation. Most writers go for TV and movies, incredibly competitive but potentially lucrative careers. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to move to Los Angeles.

I asked myself what I liked about storytelling in videogames. The answer was that I felt like I was part of the story, instead of an observer in someone else’s story. One writing career lesson I didn’t learn soon enough is that sometimes you have to pivot when one avenue isn’t working out, so, I said to myself, I should try to make it as a video game writer.

Then the inevitable question followed…  so how do you become a video game writer?

My First Strange Gig

I scoured game studio websites for an entire year, but I didn’t see many open game writer jobs available. Then, one day my brother told me about a guy he’d recently met looking for a writer. I sent a few sample scripts, which the team liked, and I was hired. It was a strange, ambitious, iPad game called Alfa-Arkiv.

For this first gig, I wrote a series of fictional emails hidden within the app. You’d consider it a secondary or even tertiary story — imagine the types of emails you read while playing Deus Ex. The emails explored the backstories of several main characters. I suspected that most players wouldn’t read this content, but in video game writing you sort of have to have that mentality. Some people gobble up story at every opportunity, and others skip in-game text like the plague.

The value of starting your career by working on a small team is that you get to see the entire game develop right around you, day by day. You collaborate with people from every discipline. Even the discussions on how to market the game were new and exciting to me. Although Alfa-Arkiv wasn’t financially successful, it did manage to get recognition from CNET as one of the best mobile game of 2014, and more importantly, I learned a lot and cut my teeth with professional and very talented developers in the process. As the game was nearing completion, I started to look for other gigs, but again, there weren’t many game writer jobs being advertised.

If you don’t see a game writing job, try to find indie developers working on a game you’d like to write. That’s what I did, at least.

Kickstarting a Game Writing Career

I tracked tons of indie projects before eventually reaching out to a Mexican developer making a retro Zelda II throwback called Elliot Quest. Basically, I asked him if he needed help writing the story, and ended up helping him run a small but successful Kickstarter. In the meantime, I also jumped on a few other indie games. Of them, Elliot Quest was the only one to get a publisher and came out on most modern game platforms, including most recently the Nintendo Switch.

While I was working on Elliot Quest, I started taking notes on the games I was playing, analyzing story, character development, pacing, and what narrative tools the writers had at their disposal. I also began reading game design books like: Theory of Fun and The Art of Game Design.

As Elliot Quest’s development was wrapping up, I finally found a few video game writing jobs and applied to all of them. I received plenty of rejections, most of the time in the form of never hearing anything back. This is part of the entertainment industry, and certainly videogames. Competition is stiff. Getting noticed is a combination of hard work, who you know, and luck.  For a select few studios I got a writing test, and of those I interviewed with one or two companies. But no job offers.

I didn’t know many people in the game industry, other than a handful of indie developers. I had two indie game credits to my name. If I had to guess why my materials got noticed, it’d be that I wrote speculative scripts based on mainstream, popular games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Mass Effect. Although I’ve never written fan fiction, a spec script can be a powerful tool to demonstrate to potential employers that you can write in a particular voice or genre:

Never underestimate the power of a spec script.

Multitasking My Way to AAA

Armed with spec scripts, I got my first mid-sized studio job, a six-month contract working for Trendy Entertainment. My employment started right after some upheaval at the studio, after which I joined a pre-production team for Dungeon Defenders 2. I wrote a lot of lore and world-building documents, as well as character bios.

In 2013 I saw that the University of Texas at Austin was starting a video game fellowship, the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy: Free tuition and a living stipend, and directed by Warren Spector. There were only twenty spots, and I figured that a video game writer didn’t have a chance in hell of getting in. But I did.

Although I never took a coding class in college, I knew that having a more diverse skillset would both make me more attractive to potential employers as well as give me a better insight into how games are made – which would translate into my ability to write better video game stories. I took all the basic courses in code academy, and also began to (slowly) learn a game engine, Unity. Later, I’d use Unity to build interactive games (Telltale-Lite) but more interactive than, say, a Twine game. 

Anyhow, I also learned basic level design in Unity and completed as many tutorials as I could. Armed with my spec scripts, I applied to the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy and, to my surprise, got an interview. When I was speaking to Warren Spector, the inevitable question came up. What would I do if the game we decided to make didn’t need a story? Due to my work in Unity, I was able to say that I could jump onto level design or potentially even audio (I play guitar and piano, and have sub-par editing skills). I got in.

The Denius-Sams Gaming Academy is no more, and I killed it. Kidding. Unfortunately, the program only lasted two years, and I was in the first of two classes. Really, that the program isn’t around is a shame, because in a short nine months, so much video game wisdom was crammed in my head, not just by the program’s faculty (Warren Spector, Joshua Howard, and David Cohen) but also a myriad of veteran game developers who came to speak: Richard Garriot, David Bettner, Max Hoberman, and a host of other veteran developers

Nearing the end of the fellowship, the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy hosted a job fair, and Gearbox was one of the participating studios. Write for Gearbox, the studio who made Borderlands? Yeah, I’m in.

The Road to AAA

By now, I had an armada of materials, indie game credits, as well as my spec scripts, which I’d turned into short interactive games using Unity and a plug-in called Fungus. As luck would have it, Gearbox was looking for a writer — I say luck because posted AAA writing jobs are incredibly rare, amazingly competitive, and you should apply anyway. I landed a writing test, then a phone interview, then an on-site interview, and finally a job offer. Now I’m the lead writer of Jedi - Survivor. What a journey!

For most, becoming a game writer is a long, twisted path filled with tons of rejection (unless you catch a break) in which you’ll spend years working for just the opportunity to prove your writing chops. The honest truth is that there are a million factors that can ultimately determine whether you get that job or not. Who you know. The weather. So, my best advice is to:

Make your own games.

Reach out to indie studios. 

Be fearless. Embrace rejection. 

Everyone’s path to game writing is different. But there’s an upside. Video game writers are part of a small, welcoming community. So, on your path to becoming a game writer, don’t be afraid to ask for advice along the way.