Some novelists are becoming video game writers and vice-versa
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The deft writing in that game is my go-to example for how to avoid that dime-store novella quality "purple prose," that you see so much in D&D fiction, and it easily holds its own against strong contenders in the writing category (Disco Elysium, Baldur's Gate, etc.).
Fair warning if you decide to go play it: spellcasting in the game is almost stupidly OP (cough Skin of the Dragon cough). Still great fun, but the combat is by far the weakest aspect of the game.
I would correct that to say balance is the weakest part. The open-endedness of the game is one of its strong suits (which is surprising given how it’s written) but there are many opportunities for an enterprising player to break the game. You can make your party fabulously wealthy just by exploiting the merchants in the game and then use the money to deck out the party with overpowered equipment.
The bigger issue is giving the player a "Invulnerability spell" where X mana = X turns, and having the spell block both PHYSICAL and MAGICAL damage. Worse, you can (and I did as a kid) find this spell in the first chapter of the game.
If your party gets move priority, there is literally NEVER a reason to not immediately throw it on all three characters. You can even rest WHILE in combat and recover the stamina necessary to cast the spell. Let that sink in for a minute.
I used to deliberately skip getting that scroll after I beat it the first time because it made the game trivially easy.
Also all long-range physical damage (such as with crossbows) was basically pointless. They should have made it so if you successfully hit with a crossbow, the opponent becomes "temporarily hampered" and it halves their movement speed. As it is, it's trivially easy to engage in close combat with almost every enemy in game.
I'd love to see a modernized BAK with more D&D style combat mechanics (attacks of opportunity, flanking, etc.)
He actually later officially novelized the game. Kind of an interesting bit of trivia in the video game industry going from literature to game and then back to literature.
Apparently he's written for Crysis and his next book is on backburner because Video Games actually pay rent :-).
Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watt...
The barrier to entry seems confusing, though. None of my agents seem to understand that world (fair enough!). I’ve written whole scripts for games - as writing exercises - but I find the learning curve of the engines too vicious to realistically have time to do a good job of producing a whole game solo.
I wonder if anyone has any advice. It doesn’t feel like book / film world, where you get an agent, they shop your story around, etc. I wouldn’t even know where to start, given how many production companies there are.
But it’d be incredibly interesting - creatively, and in terms of seeing the other side of the process, the limitations that need to be written around, etc - to work with someone, or a small team. I’d love to try that. There is so much room for innovation in storytelling when compared with writing for the page or screen.
(Though I’m certain there are a million dudes out there who think: “I have a great idea for a game!”, lol.)
—Email sent from video game writer to fellow author, c. 2025
This is why we can't have good things. Too many people are stuck behind the status debate, and in particular caring about status also means protecting norms that might not be beneficial to one's art.
Basically, caring about being high brow is IMHO in opposition to being creative and innovative. It can be in small or big ways, but that happens at some level I guess.
The more interesting debate to me is where the money is: it's a lot easier to work in a field that can sustain creators, and if the money is in games, game creators will outlast the other field creators.
I am actually learning Unreal engine for artistic purposes but I don't really like games. Video games for me are forever linked to growing up playing Atari and 16 bit Nintendo so it is hard to take seriously as art, even while learning Unreal to make art.
True creativity, innovation and money usually don't go together. Composer Charles Ives I think is a really good example. Most of Ives life he would have introduced himself as an actuary in insurance. Ives also though probably doesn't make the same music if he didn't have the insurance income.
The nature of the taste of the mass market in time almost dictates that only a few true lucky geniuses can be innovate, creative and make a great living all at the same time.
We could probably have better things if we mythologized the life of someone like Ives that fits the present economic reality much better than The Beatles or Picasso.
He then went on to write The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I enjoyed a lot, and more recently Exordia - which is amusingly similar in themes and specific plot elements to the Book of Sorrow and really feels like Seth went "wait I wasn't done with that yet".
"The Third Force" novel and the associated game "Gadget" are probably not well known - but if you liked Myst you might like them. It's a bit more of a visual story than a puzzle game - a bizarre psychological/psychedelic story with stunning for the time graphics (1993 or 1997 depending on the version).
https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US/news/agreement-with-random-...
The plot twist at the end of Crysis, when you don’t realize there was an intelligent purpose to a game mechanic… was an absolutely unforgettable moment. I don’t want to put any spoilers… something you took into the entire game suddenly becomes extraordinarily important at the end.
Only a great novelist could’ve put that together.
But imagine spending $30 on a story-driven video game and just skipping the story.
That's almost as bad as buying a book and never reading it.
(Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit).
> (Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit).
Buying books and reading books are separate hobbies. Everyone knows this.
I cannot imagine buying a "story driven videogame" honestly. I love reading and I love stories, but to me the appeal of videogames is to play. Videogame stories mostly just get in the way of the actual appealing fun part for me
Mass Effect 1 had the worst gameplay, honestly. The shooting mechanics weren't good, the RPG mechanics felt tacked on. It did have the best story and most developed lore and characters though, but they aren't good enough for me to ever want to replay it
2 had the best gameplay imo, but ths story took a nosedive. Some of the characters are alright, but overall it's a really bad story here
3 was probably the middle ground between them. The story picked up a bunch of the hanging plot threads from 1 that 2 wound up ignoring. It also changed the gameplay a bit from 2 in ways that weren't good imo
I used to think this sort of thing was the pinnacle of video games. Now I prefer playing stuff like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, where the story is not the focus, but the gameplay is very fun and dynamic
Witcher 2 was a serviceable game with a serviceable story
Witcher 3 was a vast sprawling story with gameplay that got old fast and it made the story a slog to get through. I had to force myself to finish it
I played Cyberpunk four times in a row just because it is so damn fun to actually play and try out different builds and approaches to completing the missions
Every videogame journalist who writes about games from a "ludonarrative" perspective just comes across as someone who failed to get into writing about movies
I have one criteria: is the game fun to play
I can put up with a lot of cringe in a story if the game is fun
After all, cutscenes and dialog are almost always skippable. Gameplay isn't
I'll take Dark Souls minimalist storytelling or Cyberpunk's cringe storytelling but fun gameplay over any kind of game with mid gameplay and amazing writing
Edit:
I guess what I'm really saying is that for me, a good story and characters is icing, but games must be fun first. A bad game with good writing is still a bad game. A good game with bad writing is still a good game
I do not understand why people place so much emphasis on non-gameplay elements when judging a game. Watch a show or read a book instead if story is your main concern
Or does recommending a negative not really work?
ETA: Or, to make it simpler, most people are more interested in finding things they might like than in finding ways to no longer enjoy things they already like.
I don't agree at all that this is true. I've greatly enjoyed replaying story-driven games much as I would enjoy rereading a book I enjoy. Much like with a good book, there is enjoyment to be had in immersing yourself in that world again, spending time with the characters you grew to like, and noticing things about the work that you didn't spot the first time around.
I guess the atmosphere sells me on games. That's a whole other thing. I note "/setting".
Yeah, Keanu as Silverhand is fun
But by the fourth time through the game when you hit those Relic Malfunctions that are long and drawn out and trigger long and unskippable talking scenes, I was pretty ready for a game option that was "Get rid of all of this and let me play without interruptions"
I would have loved a quest system in that game that would randomly assign a building in the city to have a random enemy type inside it and an objective to handle, so I could just play
I love that game. I think it is very fun. I like trying out different builds and weapons. I would probably play it more but the idea of starting a new game is not appealing. I don't want to slog through the first few hours of the game again until after the failed heist just to get the game world to open up
Disco elysium, deus ex, cyberpunk 2077 have tremendous replay value to me in various ways. The story, for me, builds the flavour and the world, gets excited and invested, so that I want to replay and spend time in that game. It's not tough mutually exclusive from also enjoying games purely for their mechanics.
I enjoy both. I wouldn't want a video game which has no interesting gameplay, but neither am I very drawn to games which are pure game and don't bother to have an interesting story. They are at least better than the former, and can even be good (Doom for example), but IMO can't reach the heights of games which are fun to play and have an interesting story.
Look at Disco Elysium with more than a million words written, but also anything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Colony Ship to Days of the Tentacle and Monkey Island and Space Quest, plus Mass Effect and KOTOR, Baldur's Gate and Plascape Torment... Great writing makes for great games :)
The challenge always is ensuring that when you serve two masters, you don't wind up serving only one (as happens to many novelists or writers who went to Hollywood, and perhaps now with video game projects...).
I have never before or since met a more self indulgent, greedy, stuck up set of snobs in all my time. People who are exposed to their work might think them interesting, funny people but they were quite serious and believe themselves at the pinnacle of writing.
I think the stage has long been set for professional novelists to show up and eat their lunch.
Been playing games my entire life and even the most popular games like the Zelda series have average writing. Just because it’s serviceable doesn’t make it long lasting.
Even those games with interesting stories like Bioshock or Red Dead Redemption don’t hold a candle to what literature can offer.
They all really feel ephemeral compared to books which seem to last beyond the life of their authorship. Are there any games that will be the same? The medium itself means that it’s highly unlikely any of the games will be available in 200 years from now compared to the biology book I have from 1850s that still works fine and still bounded together.
Like palworld was good but palworld with a story would have been a multi billion dollars Machine.
Palworld is an odd example. It isn't like the writing in Pokemon was top tier? Does Monster Hunter even have a story? Not one I've ever heard spoken of.
I did enjoy "Slay the Princess" but my beef with such type of "games" is that they could have easily been in a different format with minimal loss of storytelling, like a webpage for instance.
Disco Elesium seems really cool and way different than what I imagined.
Also Planescape Torment looks great too, I actually like those type of games (forgetting the genre name ATM). Definitely bought both of them, excited to see how they handle storytelling in the medium.
While on the subject, have you ever played the Legacy of Kain stories? I hear those have great stories as well but from what I can surmise (and read on wikipedia) is that those would have been best seller fantasy books if in a different medium.
To the point where theres something like 4 teams making games right now claiming to be the true successor to Disco Elysium, as the publisher fired the original writers/developers and pivoted to mobile game development.
I cannot recommend it enough. I played Outer Worlds in the same month, and Outer Worlds has the depth of a fox news rant in comparison.
Definitely a factor, writing is generally poor, but the writers are acting as if they are literary genius.
I can count a handful of games that I actually think are well written.