We're looking for a principal writer for an online shooter. You *must* know from online PvP games. Also, be legally able to work in Montreal (i.e. you are Canadian, or a permanent resident, or have an active work visa ..read more

Here are some terms I've heard thrown around while we were talking about game narrative. Some are entirely idiosyncratic to me and my crowd. Others are common.  What are yours? Artifact Something left over from a previous draft that no longer makes sense or serves its purpose. Narrative cruft. Asset A single object that exists in the game, such as a gun, a tree, a beer can. An asset can be easily cloned. Environmental artists make assets. Narrative folk may write text for assets that have labels. What’s on the labels of beer cans in this world? As You Know, Bob Dialogue that recounts what ..read more

 We saw the Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Fascinating to watch how his style changed -- how he found it, and then sort of lost it. This was interesting: <blockquote>The recipe of a work of art -- its ingredients -- how to make it--the formula. There must be a clear preoccupation with death--intimations of mortality... Tragic art, romantic art, etc. deals with the knowledge of death. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire. Irony. This is a ..read more

(This is an adaptation of a talk I've given a few times, at companies I've worked for, and at the East Coast Game Convention. I wrote it about video game writing, but it is almost entirely applicable to film and television writing, and mostly applicable to a lot of other creative endeavors.) In this business, you’ll get creative criticism from all sorts of people. Your boss, probably. Sometimes by co-workers. If you’re smart, you’ll ask for criticism from people who report to you. Whenever the game comes out, you may get criticism from random strangers on the Internet, although that is often ..read more

There is a lovely scene in The Witcher tv series, Season 3 episode 4, where Geralt and Yennefer get back together after some time. They have an argument, forgive each other, and kiss. I imagine the writers, Rae Benjamin and Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, wrote a draft of this scene, and got bored. This is an obligatory scene -- you can't really move the plot along without seeing how they feel about each other after being apart. But the viewer can probably guess everything they're going to say. But they have to say it. But it's boring to write, and probably boring to watch.  They hit on a ..read more

 I've been hearing a lot of about the use of AI -- large language models, or LLMs -- like ChatGPT -- in writing. For example, game writing. Couldn't ChatGPT come up with a lot of barks? And quests? And stories? And backstories? The most important thing to know about ChatGPT is that when you pronounce it in French, it means, "Cat, I farted." ("Chat, j'ai pété.") Okay, maybe not the most important thing, but surprisingly relevant. ChatGPT is not "artificial intelligence" in the sense of "the machine is smart and knows stuff." ChatGPT takes a prompt and then searches through an enormous data ..read more

Human beings are perfectly capable of absorbing stories non-linearly. Very often we meet a person and only later find out about their past. Our experience of them grows and changes over time. That's the best way to present character backstories, too. We need to see the character behave in the present before we care about how they got to be the way they are. We should only learn about their past once we have a sense of them in the present. Backstories don't need to be set in stone. Some games let you pick the player's character's backstory, and then will adjust dialogue accordingly.  Bu ..read more

There's backstory that's in the game, and backstory that is in the game bible. I am all for backstory that makes its way into the game, and wary of game bible backstory. (What I'm writing here also goes for novels and TV shows, but games do a lot more world building, so I'll stick to games here.) It is easy to write backstory. Backstory, when it is not in the game, costs nothing except the time it takes for the writer to come up with it. People look at The Lord of the Rings and its yards of backstory and think it's not a real fantasy world unless you can trace the hero's lineage back generatio ..read more

One of the folks I'm working with here in Hangzhou started playing the Rocky Horror Show soundtrack on the taxi's speakers (which is apparently a thing you can do here), and I mentioned I've seen the movie maybe 30 times. She asked why it was such a big deal. My first answer was that it's a movie for people who feel like they're weird and maybe they're the only weird person in the world, to get together with other weird people and feel comfortable and maybe being weird is okay or even good. Also, it came out at a time when gender fluidity was not a thing, so it was daring. But I went home and ..read more

Many years ago, I was asked to fly down to Cape Town as the Head Writer on a strange sf tv show called CHARLIE JADE, along with two fellow Canadians, Sean Carley and the irrepressible Denis McGrath, whom we all miss terribly.  It was a Canadian-South African co-production, which meant we had to hire South African writers for half the scripts. And we had a hell of a time finding good ones. We found one very fine writer, Dennis Venter, but I was never happy with the others, whose scripts we basically threw out and rewrote. (They got the credit anyway. Them's the rules.) There obviously wer ..read more