Jan 15
Writer’s Guild Announces Game Nominations
The Writer’s Guild of America has announced their nominations for the first ever Video Game Writing Award. Can I get a drum roll? Cue the dramatic lights. Roll back the curtain, because here they are!
- Crash of the Titans,” written by Christopher Mitchell for Sierra Entertainment
- “Dead Head Fred,” written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan for D3 Publisher
- “The Simpsons Game,” with lead writer Matt Selman, written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, dialogue by Jeff Poliquin for Electronic Arts
- “The Witcher,” with lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, dialogue by Sebastian Stepien, additional dialogue by Marcin Blacha and writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole for Atari
- “World in Conflict,” story design by Christofer Emgard, story consultant Larry Bond and script consultant Ed Zuckerman for Sierra Entertainment.
That feeling in the pit of your stomach? No, it isn’t pride, its disappointment. Evidently having a good game script (gameplay?) doesn’t rely on you having a good game. Sure some of these stand out but none of them are the ones we all shouted about all year for having a great story, namely Bioshock. It is heartening to see that games weren’t just selected for popularity as far bigger and more publicly recognizable games aren’t on the list at all. It should be noted that the game scripts had to be submitted so it may just be that these games weren’t even looked at. Either way, if they are truly honoring the writing then the gameplay shouldn’t matter, right? Just like films, a great screenplay can be destroyed by a crappy director or production. It is good to see the WGA honoring game writers as more and more often game’s stories are becoming more and more complex and well written. What do you think of the nominations?
Categories: Gaming Industry, New Releases5 Comments so far
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I haven’t played any of those (except for The Simpsons Game demo), but I doubt those games are really the ones with the best scripts.
I have to wonder what a video game “script” looks like though - how do they write the parts where there are lots of different options, and do they include gameplay specifics? What exactly the script contains could change a lot.
Yea, maybe its just a general outline of the story or something. I dunno.
This can’t be a serious list. I played through Crash and it in no way deserves a nomination for anything.