A Different Kind of Art. · 10:21pm Mar 30th, 2014
I wrote this to go up on an art website, but I wanted to post it here too because very few people will actually stumble across it over there, and I'm curious to know how your reaction will differ from theirs.
I’ve always thought it would be awesome to get involved in a video game project. I don’t mean breaking into the industry to create my dream game or anything like that, just getting on board with one of these hundreds of little projects floating around the web. It doesn’t even really matter what the project is, because the reason I want to do it is so that I can try my hand at a different medium that had different goals and aspirations, to see if what I already know measures up in a different arena.
There’s a problem with that though, and one that makes it nearly impossible to get involved.
I’m a writer.
There’s this horrible, horrible attitude so many people have that writing is unimportant. You can see it in every venue and medium, and at all levels. Some days you find yourself having to defend your stance that fanfiction is in fact legitimate literature, and other days you have to explain that somebody had to write all the flavor text and menus in that RTS game you love so much.
You know what though? Even though that attitude of non-importance is insulting, painful, and wrong, it’s still something I can understand and live with. Or I could, except that there’s another idea that often comes along with it, and those two attitudes combine into something monstrous. The second idea is that writing is easy.
It’s simple enough to understand where the people who think that are coming from. It stems from an obvious difference between writing and most other creative mediums, a difference that is often a huge sticking point between writers and the people who work with those mediums. The barrier for entry in writing is so much lower than anything else.
Programmers go to school. Artists go to school. Musicians go to school. They practice for hours and hours on end to acquire the skills necessary just to make anything, let alone something good. It is possible to do each of those without formal training, but is orders of magnitude more difficult, and most people who try will eventually back themselves into a corner just because they can’t see the common pitfalls along the way. Those skills are hard won and the people who have them are right to be proud of their abilities. But when those same people look at writing, they don’t see that barrier to entry. Writers can go to school, but it's less of a requirement and more of a good idea.
That’s the sticking point. That’s the attitude that leads people to say, “Our coders can write, our artist can write, our designer can write, our musician can write, and the project lead can write. Writing is the easy part. What can you do that’s actually useful?”
And when you’re faced with that kind of reasoning, what can you say?
Imagine it’s the other way around. Lets say you’re an artist with the same desires. You want to expand your creative horizons by doing something new and different. You’ve always thought that tailoring your art to a new set of goals and needs is an intriguing creative challenge, and the idea of working as part of a team to make something that’s bigger than anything you could do on your own appeals to you. So you go looking for projects.
You don’t know where to look at first, but eventually you find a few people with interesting ideas, and a few projects that look like they might actually get off the ground. Maybe they’re video games, or animations, or graphic novels.
You approach these people and offer your help, even show them a few examples of what you can do, but they turn you down with, “Thanks, but we’ve already got a great artist, what we really need is somebody who can code.”
You grumble to yourself a little, but really, if they don’t need an artist, they don’t need an artist and you should just go look elsewhere.
As you go to leave though, you notice something. The “great artist” is the guy running the project, or his best friend. Curious, you go to their profile to check out what they have, and you’re greeted with this:
What can you say? Everything else about this project looked like it was actually good. Do you tell them? Do you let them know that if they run with this the whole thing is going to crash and burn? How do you react when they tell you “Oh that’s just a concept sketch. We’ll clean it up for the real thing.”
How do you react when you get variations on that theme everywhere you go?
The truth is, writing does have a barrier to entry, and a really hard one to overcome as well. It’s just not in the place where most people expect it to be. The barrier for writing is further along in the learning process, and many people don’t even realize when they've hit it.
With writing, the barrier isn’t in learning the initial skills, it’s found in the process of going from passable to good, and from good to great. What’s worse, most of overcoming that barrier is found in the adoption and perfection of difficult to define or even comprehend mindsets. It’s all under-the-hood, so to speak. Creativity and basic literacy skills have very little to do with it. It’s about learning to judge ideas, what the audience wants, why they want it, and how it’s different than what they think they want. It’s about figuring out what makes a joke funny, a sentence awkward sounding, and a somber moment meaningful. It’s about learning to see the times when things that are normally unbearably bad are delightfully quirky, and vice-versa.
The thing that separates a great writer from a good one, and a good one from a passable one is their ability to analyse; to analyse their own work from every angle, and to analyse the audience they are trying to reach, the equivalent to an artist learning how to really see. It’s something both nebulous and frustrating, and somehow still every bit as technical and anal as learning the rules of grammar. Some of that ability can be bought with instinct and talent, but relying on those alone will bring horrendous fluctuations in quality and eventually leave you wondering why your stuff isn't popular anymore.
And here's the thing that just kills interaction with the other arts. Nobody else will ever notice if you can do it.
Right now, I’m writing a new chapter for an ongoing fanfiction of mine. That fanfiction is a stupid, small, off-the-wall comedy filled to the brim with references and overly elaborate metaphors. All of those are intentional, precisely controlled design choices.
No reader who comes across my story will realize how difficult it is to keep stupidity at a level where it’s funny instead of annoying. Most won’t realize that the reason why it holds together so well in spite of the ridiculous premise is that it is founded on a solid, serious theme. Nor will they realize that the reason some of the funny stuff in it carries so well across so many people is because they’re actually multiple jokes blended together so thoroughly that they look like only one. They will never realize that I spent more thought and energy on one single three word sentence fragment than I have writing up this whole journal entry.
But you know what they will notice? They’ll notice that my story makes them laugh. The really observant ones might stop and take a moment to wonder why it is that someone like me, who can’t tell a joke in realtime to save his life, can write something that makes them laugh so hard and so often. They’ll wonder for a second, and then chalk it up to the stupid premise, never to realize that it’s because I’ve spent days analyzing every aspect of my little two-thousand word chapter.
Writing is not easy. It takes every bit as much effort and dedication to master as any other art or technical skill. That mastery does not come quickly nor to everyone. I wish I could say that I’m a master, but the truth is I’m not. I am, however, someone who has passed the barrier from passable to good, and I’m constantly pushing for great.
In the wake of all that time and effort and hard-won skill, it really hurts to run into people who say, “Well if you want to get involved in a project, you should just learn to draw. Everybody needs an artist.”
Everybody needs a writer too, but few realize it.
Edit: I deleted it off the other site because I'm a fucking coward and don't want to deal with more angry and/or condescending people than I have to.
Amen!
Well said.
So... let's talk about this!
Actually, no. People hire writers for tons of games. Indeed, large numbers of writers are hired for games like Skyrim and the like.
But here's the thing - say I was going to make a video game. Who am I going to hire? Honestly, I'm probably going to hire some writer who actually knows about the production of games or video games, because, quite frankly, there are gigantic piles of writers.
I'll note that a major reason why people don't think about writing is because literacy and mathematics are two advanced skills that literally everyone is taught. This is not to say that there aren't people who are more literate or much more mathematically skilled than others - there are - but unlike, say, computer programming or art, everyone who has been educated (which is essentially everyone - and certainly everyone who gets paid to work on a video game) is literate and knows at least some algebra.
In other words, it isn't that writing isn't important - it is that writing is SO important that it is omnipresent to the point where people don't think about it at all. In a society where literacy is uncommon, it is much less taken for granted - but fewer people can appreciate it as well. If you're illiterate in modern society, you're an uneducated rube who is barely able to function in society, if you can function at all.
When you live in a culture where some skills are considered necessary for all people to possess, at least on some level, it becomes extremely easy to forget that those skills are indeed actual learned skills. I come from a culture where scientific knowledge is required, so I take for granted the idea that people understand basic geology, chemistry, physics, and biology. We also assume that people have a basic knowledge of US and World history (when the US was founded, the major wars it was involved in, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Mesopotamia, the rise of Europe, colonial ambitions, ect.) and geography (they know where the US, Russia, China, Japan, and Europe are, as well as the continents of the world). These are all things you have to learn, and indeed, schools spend a significant amount of time imparting said knowledge to people.
So it isn't terribly surprising that a lot of people take writing for granted. It isn't that writing isn't a skill, but that writing is a skill that most people possess on some level - and I'll also note, the people who actually went to college tend to be the most literate people, which means that amongst them, they are the most likely to not really understand the idea of people being outright BAD at writing.
Incidentally, people are not wrong to dismiss fanfiction. When you consider Sturgeon's Law - 90% of professionally published literature sucks - then it immediately becomes obvious that fanfiction, which is much, much less polished and worked over and refined, is going to be EVEN WORSE. I would be unsurprised if somewhere between 95 and 98% of fanfiction was "crap" per Sturgeon's Law.
Also:
Quite frankly, it has been my general experience that while many artists choose to go to school for art, art school has very little to do with people actually getting good at art. Many people who go to art school go there because they're already good at art, and while one would expect art school to drive these folks to become much better at art than they already are, that isn't what I have observed in the environment. Some people DO become better... but I've seen lots of other people who become better simply because they decided to practice doing new things, and to practice a lot, and the people who CHOOSE to get better seem to make enormous progress. Heck, if you look at a lot of webcomic artists, they improve massively in short periods of time.
I think one of the main problems is that there are very few programs which are actually good at TEACHING how to draw, and many art programs do not actually push artists to greatly improve their abilities and shore up their weaknesses, intead focusing on nonsense.
The exception to this seems to be the more empirical fields of art - graphic design and the like - where they actually DO teach people design theory and the psychology of consumers and suchlike.
But as far as drawing a very pretty dragon goes, I am uncertain if art school is actually all that helpful, because while many great artists have gone to art school, there are tons of people who went to art school who are still awful artists, and of the people I know who went to art school, in many cases their art did not improve as a result of it. Getting better at art seems to be more about actually pushing yourself to draw new things and to overcome weaknesses and to learn what you're doing "wrong" and fix it, and much less about classroom instruction - it is very heavily practice based, and it is based on you yourself practicing it and driving yourself there.
That's not to say that you shouldn't learn how to draw - you should - but I am uncertain how good art school is at actually producing a great artist, as opposed to, say, how good MIT is at producing a good engineer.
Thing is, a lot of games aren't heavily reliant upon writing, so in those cases, they're not even wrong. Games which are heavily dependent on writing tend to have dedicated writers whose job it is to, you know, do the writing, or else they end up sucking. I know that, for instance, Magic: The Gathering has a creative team, whose job it is to deal with the world of a magic card set.
The other issue is that writing takes time, which means that you might dedicate a person to writing just because that is useful to do, so as to compartmentalize the work.
A third issue, however, and the most relevant one here, is that someone who is good at writing and nothing else is probably a liability on a video game project. Understanding programming, even if you aren't a GOOD programmer, is important when you're dealing with video game design; likewise, understanding graphical design to some extent is important when you're dealing with video game writing, because people are going to have to actually present your writing in a living world, and if you write things that cannot be done (or cannot be done cheaply enough), then you're creating work for them which isn't going to help. If you don't understand the basics of game design - how engagement works, how narrative blends with the engagement curve necessary to maintain interest, how to integrate gameplay and storytelling - then you are again worthless.
And frankly, most writers don't have these skills, and thus should not work on video game projects because they are too incompetent to do so. Sometimes they end up working for them anyway, and you can see the results.
As someone who actually is involved in game design, I can tell you that being a good writer isn't enough to be a writer for a game, and indeed, being a mediocre writer with a good grasp on game design is BETTER for the game's writing than being a good writer with a mediocre grasp of game design, because mediocre writing which is servicable is better than great writing which isn't right for a game.
Consider, for instance, Xenosaga. It has an enormous amount of writing in it. And it ends up with hour long cutscenes as a result. Look at the complaints about the Metal Gear Solid series. And look at the praise for Bastion. Does Bastion have ridiculously amazing writing as compared to a lot of other games? It is above average, but the story is pretty average; it has a good voice actor, but it essentially has ONE VA (with two others with bit parts, both of whom sing). What really sets it apart, along with games like Portal, is the fact that the narrative and the gameplay go hand in hand - the story progresses as the game progresses, instead of it being story, game, story, game.
This is vastly harder to do, and writing for a game is extremely different from writing a novel or a TV show. It is a very distinct beast, one which most writers have absolutely no experience whatsoever, and yet they look at video games, scoff at the drivel that is present, and say, "I can do better," without recognizing the WHY or the HOW. The problem is that the person who wrote that video game thought the same thing, most likely.
And this is ignoring the great difficulty in, say, writing something like Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins. Making a game where you can make real choices is incredibly attractive.
It is also a complete nightmare to create, because the more "real" your choices are, the exponentially more programming they have to do. If you have a story which splits the game in half, then you're essentially programming two games - and half of that game, half the players won't see!
And most writers cannot even grasp this, because for them, it isn't that much more work. Sure, it is more work to write two stories instead of one, but they can totally do it.
It is not so easy for an entire team to do this.
You're wrong.
People can tell the difference between someone who is good at this and someone who is bad at this. They won't understand why it is that one person is better than another, but they will understand that one is better. But the only way they can judge is by the final output; by what they actually produce.
But we can look at, say, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Good Omens, and compare them to various stories on this website, and see vast differences in quality. Peple won't be able to tell you why those are better, but they'll be able to tell, especially in aggregate.
Eh, the universal engagement curve is taught in school. Honestly, pretty much everyone has the basic skills - the question is how good they are at them. Some people are very bad at them, some people are very good at them, but the hard part isn't actually learning the skills, but rather applying them properly.
The hardest part IS targeting your audience... but this is also the most empirical thing, which gives you the advantage that you can simply find out. You can test it. In fact, films and similar things are tested on audiences.
Have you?
What proof have you that you have done so?
Do other people pay you to write stuff for them?
Because, in the end, that is the true test of your value - because there are people who have, in fact, made money from their writing. If you are one of them, then you can actually say you're good.
Until then, you cannot truly claim to be a good writer.
And every writer needs an editor. Preferably several.
1967690 Thank you for that really involved response. There's a good chunk of it that I agree with completely, and a lot that I don't, and I'll come back to most of it later. But there is one thing that stood out that I need to address right now.
This is wrong. There is no other way to put it. It is completely, totally, one hundred percent wrong. It's based on several assumptions of how skill, motives, and opportunity tie together that just don't pan out in the real world. Rather than write a whole essay on the subject though, it's probably better to just show an example. This artist never got paid. He was still a good artist.
1967867
I think you missed my point, which was not that there are not people who are skilled who never make good use of their skills, but rather that making good use of your skills is the only way to have your skill truly be judged.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, but, more or less, you are extremely prone to overestimating your own ability - and the less skilled you are, the more likely you are to overestimate your own skills. Thus the only reliable way to have your skill truly judged is to be subjected by judgement by the very skilled.
That's why "if you haven't published, you can't claim to be a good writer" is a perfectly reasonable thing to state - passing the barrier to publication means that you've proved yourself to be good enough for other people to pay you for your work. Making useful things is very strong evidence for your skill level.
This is why experience and recommendations matter so much in the real world, because they are a good way of judging whether or not you are competent. Degrees, too, can be of varying degrees of value depending on the accreditation of the institution which gave it to you - graduating from CalTech is a mark of true honor, for instance, because only the best are even let in there. Graduating from some random state school with no reputation in the field, you're much more taking your chances. From some private university which hasn't shown the quality of its graduates? Even dicier.
The more your skills have been tested and given a pass by those who have done the same, the more we can trust your skill level.
Moreover, the man in the link may have been good at drawing, but being good at drawing and being a great artist are not the same thing. It is in the application of your skill from which greatness comes, not the greatness of your skill itself.
1968053 I missed your point because you did not make it.
Yes, I am familiar with the effect, and I account for it in all of my estimations. I seek judgement by those who are more skilled than I am and I use that judgement to establish a baseline for my own. That judgement has been unanimously favorable, even from people who have worked and had very prominent positions in the relevant fields. If you want a more objective assessment. How's this? Both stories I've submitted to EQD were accepted, and they went through the process much faster than average. I don't know any of the pre-readers or staff either, they went through on the merits of my writing alone. What's more, they were both accepted during periods where their pre-readers were openly hostile to the types of stories I was submitting.
If you're not satisfied with EQD's selection policies, you can instead look at the numbers for my stories. In every respect they're very good numbers, favorites, upvotes, downvotes, favorite-to-upvote ratio, upvote-to-downvote ratio, number of readers lost between chapters, and so on and so forth.
Or you can look at the comments. Readers like to nitpick stories that don't satisfy. There is little to none in mine. Out of the seven hundred plus on Princesses Don't Potty, I can think of exactly one that was truly negative. And while I wish there were more that really dove in to analyse what I'm writing, the ones that do are also overwhelmingly positive.
I have been judged by my superiors and accepted, I've been judged by my peers and accepted, I've been judged by my critics and accepted, I've been judged by my audience and accepted, and I've been judged by statistics and accepted. So yes. I can with complete confidence say that I am a good writer.
No True Scotsman
I've done a few games as a programmer in a small team (4 - 6 people) and here are two of the games I've done (you can install and play them too):
Fat Boy Mint
Puzbot
What I can tell you is this: In a small team and small project, the game mechanics usually take priority over the story. That is, as part of a team, I want the game to be fun and engaging to play before having a story and that is true for many of the small games out there.
Usually, the game designer comes with the idea and the premise (in a game's case, a high concept). In both cases above, the game designer came up with the story and only as much as we need to justify certain elements (like boss fights) otherwise, we simply let the gameplay to carry the game.
This isn't a slight against writers. I'm a writer here too and this is a fact: the scope of a small game project simply does not justify the need of a dedicated writer. A dedicated writer is someone we have to bring into the game idea and have to understand what the game is about and for a work that is very limited in scope with what amounts to a full-timer. On top of that, we have to worry whether if that person is really interested or passionate about the idea (passion and interest gives a better work contribution, after all). This is why most of the small teams don't really bother.
Yes, someone has to write the game dialogue (if any), someone has to write the flavor text, someone has to write the backstory (if any) and yes, a dedicated writer could do it heaps better but the game designer is an adequate replacement to this because: 1) he/she knows the game idea, 2) understands what the game is about and 3) doesn't require a lot more of their time (because the scope is very limited).
As what I have said above, this has nothing to do with not hiring writers for small game projects.
I'll say more but I have to head off to school for now.
1968099
Meaningless, because EQD prereaders are not an accepted authority on the quality of work. That's not to say they're terrible at it, but it is nothing akin to being paid a thousand dollars for your stories; the bar is set much lower, and the prereaders were not selected on the basis of being great writers or editors themselves.
These numbers are only so meaningful. Princesses Don't Potty is rated as highly as it is because of the subject matter and the title; it is precisely the sort of story that gets that many upvotes/views. There are numerous stories with fewer views/upvotes which are better than it is, though that does not make it a BAD story by any means - I am not saying that. I am merely saying that, quite frankly, you have four stories. Two of them have less than 300 views. Of the remaining two stories, both of them are almost entirely dependent on Equestria Daily for their volume.
That does not establish you as a brilliant writer.
That's because almost no one on the site gives any meaningful input at all, I'm afraid.
That being said, in reality, very few negative comments are made at all in general; even on bad stories, people mostly just don't read them or avoid reading them. Most comments are banal and positive in nature.
Except this very post is you complaining about you not being able to get your foot in the door in the incredibly competitive video game industry.
You have not been judged by the publishing industry because you have never submitted anything to them.
This would suggest quite the opposite - that you have been judged by those you aspire to join and been found wanting, and have avoided being judged by people who are clearly your superiors - people who will actually give you money if you're good enough - at all. Actually getting paid to do things is a major sign of your ability; it is easy to say "You're pretty good kid." It is much harder to say, "You're good, kid. I want to pay you $1000 for the right to post your story on my website." The former costs you nothing; the latter, considerably more. Thus the latter form of praise is vastly more meaningful than the former, because they aren't going to pay you a bunch of money unless they mean it. I have paid people to do work for me, and it is a whole different thing looking at work from the point of view of "would I hire this person to do work for me?"
The rationalization of avoidance and rejection is a major sign of engaging in precisely the sort of reasoning that people who fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect are affected by - they reject signs of their own incompetence, and only look at signs of their own competence. Indeed, this is an extremely common effect in all people - most people are vastly more prone to think more of themselves than they should, rather than less.
I'm not saying you're a bad writer; I'm saying that you have not proven yourself to be a good one in such a way that others must believe.
If you want to get your foot in the door in the industry, you're going to need some chops. "I got 2000 upvotes on a pony fanfiction site" is nothing compared to "I get my works published in industry publications and magazines and websites" or "I wrote for a TV show" or what have you. You are not so awesome that they should want you. You need to be so awesome that they should, because, quite frankly, tons of people want to work in making video games - that is in part WHY so many in the industry are paid so poorly, because people compete to get said jobs because they are seen as desirable, even if the compensation and hours and work environments are less than ideal.
And the nicer places to work for - such as Valve - are looking for people who are very good at one thing, but also good at a lot of things - so if you are a great writer, that's fine, but you need to be able to do a lot of other things as well to work at Valve because you can't just do one thing and understand one thing and succeed in that environment. You need to be able to contribute outside of your area of expertise as well as know how to apply your area of expertise into other areas.
You're complaining about people not paying you to be awesome for them, and saying that they're wrong, and that you are awesome. That's fine... if you can prove it. And the way you prove people wrong is by succeeding.
Have you ever participated in the hiring process in any way, at anywhere that you have worked? It may grant you greater insight into the issues I am discussing, if you have not.
Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.
1967690
I know that people hire writers for games. But it’s only recently that has become the industry standard, they’re still not respected in proportion to the work they do, and that standard has not trickled down to the level of project I’m qualified to work on. I think you missed the very important point that I am not seeking to break into the industry.
.
Agreed, but if you add in the qualifier “good” before writers, that number drops drastically. And you would be a fool to reject greater skill in the area you need the writer to be skilled in when you have other options. It’s easier to teach a good writer basic production practices than to teach a good coder advanced writing skills.
Makes perfect sense to me.
I completely disagree here though. While the application of Sturgeon’s Law is correct, it’s not the only factor in play. There is a tradeoff with fanfiction. It’s the exact same tradeoff you get with indie games. Technical quality is more rare and difficult to find, but in return you gain access to unfiltered creativity, new techniques, and stories that could never be told through conventional means. You get to see raw, unthinkable narrative risk taking, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Papers Please, for example, would never, ever get past a traditional publisher.
I’m not sure how to address your thoughts on art school and its value. The value of art school is definitely debatable, but whether you choose to go or just learn on your own, my point still stands. That process is a massive barrier to entry.
Yes, they are. Until you get down to the level of Bejeweled, all games are heavily reliant on writing. Writing is more than just the dialogue. More than the menus, flavor text, and everything else that you type out. Very little to none of the story in video games is conveyed through dialogue or text. It’s done through game mechanics, environment, set pieces, puzzle types, character models, and so on and so forth. The thing that most people in the process of making these small-scale projects,—and even a good chunk of the large scale projects—tend not to realize is that all that stuff still has to be written. It is the writer’s job to take all those elements and tell a story with them.
A writer’s job in a team project is very much different than when working on something personal. He has to work with all these people because his job overlaps with all of them.
That’s of course where the desire for people who have experience with all those jobs comes into play. It’s a good desire. A writer who understands the issues with coding isn’t going to demand that they introduce new, unfeasible features. A writer who understands game design isn’t going to butt heads with the project lead or team members. The problem is, that’s a surface issue that distracts from the real one. The question isn’t, “Does the writer understand what the other people are doing?” Rather, it’s “Does the writer realize that he has to use a different set of tools, is he willing to learn to use those tools, does he understand that he’s not the one who gets to choose what those tools are, and does he understand the principles of good storytelling well enough to use them in a different medium?"
That’s why if you keep that in mind, you’re better off with a good writer who doesn’t have experience than you are with a mediocre writer who knows all the other jobs. It’s a hell of a lot easier to learn how to use a new brush than what makes a picture good or bad. It’s important to remember that the writer’s one and only job is to tell a story. They can do that regardless of medium if they're willing to learn.
On a side note, that is also why intensive writing should never begin until after the game mechanics are mostly worked out.
Those aren’t just game design issues, they’re writing issues. It is the writer’s job to know and continuously improve in those areas. At most they are a deviation from techniques he is comfortable with, and a good writer will adapt and adopt. Not knowing them automatically disqualifies you from being considered good.
Umm… No. Writing real choices is exactly as hard for writers as it is for the programmers. It’s not just about writing two different stories. You have to hold every single aspect of the story in your head and understand how changes in one place affect everything in the rest of it. Things like karma meters, for example, are absolute nightmares from a writing perspective. You’re not writing two different stories. You’re writing hundreds, and you have write them in such a way that they can be seamlessly switched out on the fly without ruining continuity or character and not diluting the meaning of those choices.
Well duh.
1968170 Okay, no seriously. You need to understand that I'm not looking to or complaining about getting into the video game industry. You are not arguing against my position or what I wrote.
1968152 That is something that makes a lot of sense, and yeah I understand those issues. On the other hand, I think most amateur game designers could really benefit from the understanding that the writer's job encompasses more than just the text, menus, and all that. It actually heavily overlaps with the designer's job (though the writer needs to understand that the premise is completely outside of his sphere). Whether or not the designer needs to bring on a writer is his decision, but if he does, he also needs to realize that the writer does a whole lot more than the one or two tasks he's envisioning.
There's certainly something to be said for how people view writing--lets say story-writing, to stay specific--differently than the other arts. I don't want to get into the why, but I think the general misconception is that to be a great painter or musician or sculptor or programmer requires lots of practice, while being a good story-writer doesn't. I feel that most tend to think almost anyone (read: themselves) can toss off a great novel without too much difficulty. After all, don't we see that sort of thing happening all the time, where brand new writers break out and create a smash hit on their first try?
But of course, as story-writers here on fimfiction, we all know this isn't really the case. It does take practice, lots of effort and thought, and constructive criticism from others, at the very least to be consistently good.
1967690
Just to be clear at the start here; I agreed with most of what you wrote.
All things considered, pointing out your contradiction above is a bit unfair, because I understand the point you're making. The fact that someone is willing to pay you means it is very likely they think you're good (since it is possible they're desperate, or are willing to settle for mediocre). But of course, as we both know, this says nothing about the buyer's own ability to properly judge skill level. After all, Sturgeon's Law has to come from somewhere (to be clear, I'm not claiming this is the only cause). Furthermore, you have to take into account the fact that a lot of literature (not to mention most other forms of art) was rejected in its day, only to be appreciated later. This is evidenced in a general way in the literary movements that have existed in the past, which favored one kind of writing, story-writing, or philosophy over others.
I agree that if you want to decide objective skill, you need to have created material that can be judged. This however in no way guarantees it will be judged properly or fairly. Yes, if someone wants me to believe they're a good writer, I want to see their work. However, if two people come to me and one has published and the other isn't, in my mind at least, that doesn't really automatically qualify the paid artist more than the non-paid one. One of the reasons for this is due to some of the amazing fanfiction I've read, compared to other paid work that didn't impress me nearly so much (I must admit here of course that in regards to fanfiction there are other factors in play, such as my preexisting love and investment in the characters used).
Having published work can be an indicator of merit, but it in no way guarantees it. Really, it's best not to judge until you read and decide for yourself.
Of course, insofar as with getting paid, they do not guarantee quality.
Come come TD, you know you can't make statements like these unless you have empirical data to back them up. Yes, many stories receive lots of attention from their premise alone (along with titles, pictures, story tags, etc)--or at least, people like to complain or claim they do--but we also know this does not apply for all stories. Can you prove it for PDP? And I'd really like to know where you got the knowledge to make the claim you do in the second half of the statement I've quoted.
1968170 I'm going to go ahead and ignore absolutely everything you've said about money for reasons that I've already said, but there's more here to address.
Your reasons for disregarding my evidence that what I write is good would be legitimate if I was limited to one or two indicators, but you're ignoring the bigger picture. When taken as a whole, with everything in context, I come out ahead. If getting a story past the pre-readers on EQD—even when they're hostile to the premise—were invalid, then there would be more negative comments and downvotes. If all of my traffic can be attributed to the premise and only the premise, then I would have lost many times more readers than I have between chapters, especially with the huge times in between the last few. If the reception is negative in spite of what the comments say, then the upvote to downvote ratio would be much worse, and so would the upvote to favorites ratio. When all is said and done, every indicator says that people like my stories, and if people like my stories than that is all the success I can hope for in a fanfiction community. I set out to entertain people, and I entertained thousands. I will not allow you to say that success is meaningless.
I am not saying that I'm amazing. I'm not claiming that I'm the best thing since Terry Pratchett. In fact, I explicitly stated from the beginning that I'm not great in any way shape or form. I could name off a half dozen stories here on fimfiction that are better than anything I've ever written, and dig up scores more. But there's something important that you need to remember. You don't have to be the best to be good. And I am good. I have proven that in the context of pony fanfiction and I am looking for more opportunities to prove it in new contexts.
As for my other two stories, I get the feeling that you didn't really look at them. One of them is my scrap pile, and the other was never meant to amount to anything anyway. To put it bluntly, they don't count because I set no expectations or goals for them in the first place.
And then there's the issue of this:
Please don't make assumptions like that. You have absolutely no idea what my experiences with the publishing industry are. You don't know if I've submitted anything, had anything rejected, or published anything. I have not given you that information, and I would not under any circumstances because I would need to include my real name and details of my life as proof that I'm not lying, and I'm not going to give that out to random people on the internet.
1968230
Okay. So let's take that point of view. How do you know this, if you do not work in the industry?
Not really, no. What is important is understanding design, of which game design is but one subset, and teaching someone design is quite hard - this is the very reason why engineers are expensive.
It is also worth remembering that college graduates are the most literate people in the US - they have the best writing skills as a group. In other words, you're not taking a "low-tier" person and bringing them up to high tier - they're already on the higher end as far as writing skills go among the general population. Indeed, engineers and scientists are expected to have very good technical writing skills, and indeed to have solid writing skills in general, because they're required to present their work and share their knowledge with both technical and non-technical personnel.
Is that the same as storytelling? No. But it means that you're not dealing with someone who is on the bottom of the totem pole as far as writing goes, either, and they've gotten some amount of college-level English.
Remember, most humans tell stories to each other - storytelling is a big part of social interaction, be it telling stories about what happened to you that day or whatever. Most people have some experience with it, and everyone who completed a high school education has been educated in story structure (or least they are out here), with college graduates getting more instruction.
Heck, look at who are stereotyped as D&D nerds.
On average, Indie Games are of massively lower quality than other types of games. Massively lower quality. And most of them are actually hugely derivative - even more so than amongst the higher quality games.
And people DO take risks in the AAA industry. Portal was hardly an indie game. Many Nintendo franchises hold their origins in things which were big AAA risks - Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Metroid Prime, Pikmin, these games were all theoretically big risks. Heck, FFVII was enormously expensive to produce, and it, too, took risks in the move to 3D from 2D (though of course, stagnation is itself a risk). Nintendo made the DS, the 3DS, the Wii, and the Wii U.
Other companies, too, have been responsible for high tier innovation - the original Thief, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dishonered, ect. were all innovative in their own ways and did new things.
People are very quick to praise the indie game industry, but it gets far more credit than it really should for a lot of things. It is true that indie games sometimes DO do interesting, quirky things, and some indie games get to play with minimalism in very interesting ways (Super Hexagon, for instance), and there are definitely neat indie games... well, most Indie Games aren't that, and a lot of the envelope pushing happens across the spectrum when someone gets a really awesome idea.
Ah, and here we get to the crux of the problem. You complained about why people don't hire more writers? Well this is it.
This stuff is highly multidisciplinary, which is precisely why people say you're going to have a hard time as "just a writer", because how much of this is "just writing"? None of it.
Take Dark Souls for instance. The moody, oppressive atmosphere, where death is dished out by weak enemies and caution keeps you alive. You have limited visibility, and interior areas tend to be poorly lit, making it difficult to see things at a distance. There's some sort of mist around, so things in the distance are blurry and dreamlike, which makes it feel all the more claustrophobic.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with writing, and writers can't tell you how to do this properly. This falls under the heading of "game design".
Do you know the proper draw distance on the fog? No? You aren't helping, then. Indeed, the way to figure it out is to set it to some values, and test it on people and see what they think and how they react.
Indeed, making the game in this way has to do with testing and making sure you're getting the desired outcome from the audience. Writers actually are useless for this - you need testers, empirical testing to make sure you aren't too frustrating, and that people get the proper vibes from it. How does a writer help with this?
The universal engagement curve is actually an intrinsic part of game design; it isn't something which is unique to writing, but indeed which is found in many sorts of entertainment - writing, filmmaking, video games, ect. Writers have experience with this, but they hardly have a monopoly on it.
Moreover, you're assuming that most games actually care about telling a story, but honestly, most games don't, not really. Stories tend to be very cursory, and that's perfectly fine. Super Mario Brothers has the overarching plot of going to save the princess, the same as you get in countless other games, but it is just an excuse plot - the game doesn't care much about the plot, and frankly, the players don't either. It is about navigating the environment - the focus of the game is not on the story but the moment to moment gameplay. The story merely is an excuse for the gameplay, but the gameplay itself is what is important.
Indeed, this is true of almost all games. Sure, Counterstrike is Terrorsts vs Counterterrorists, but as far as the players are concerned, the only real difference is the (rather minor) assymetries between the weapons. Sure, the objectives are related to the sides, but in the end, planting a bomb and rescuing hostages are nothing more than capture and hold and fetching, both of which are pretty common in FPSs across the spectrum. There's a veneer of a story, but the players aren't focused on it as a story - they're focused on the consequences in the moment to moment gameplay.
This is true of countless FPSs, which all have very heavy multiplayer focuses and which aren't about telling stories so much as creating fun gameplay. MOBAs fall into the same category, as do fighting games.
Losing an excuse plot may impact a game negatively (I felt like Rayman Legends suffered from this) but going beyond an excuse plot is only useful if you actually have a good reason to do so - the plot of Sonic Colors is still an excuse plot and does nothing to encourage me onwards in the story, nor does it give me any additional reason to be involved in the game. Time spent on such things is intrinsically time not spent elsewhere, so unless you have a very good reason to do so, spending an excessive amount of effort on story is actually actively unwise - your goal is to engage the players as they play the game via whatever means, and if there are other, better means of engaging the player, story is a distraction from what really matters as far as the developers are concerned.
If a game is devoted to exploring a specific atmosphere, then it is going to choose mechanics which suit said atmosphere, but most games are actually about exploring mechanics, and build an atmosphere around that - creative is informed by the needs of the game itself. As a result, writing isn't as valuable because it isn't actually all that central to what the game's pull is.
Some games are basically vehicles for telling the story - Final Fantasy games are especially guilty of this. And many games like this have dire gameplay, and frequently the gameplay has nothing at all to do with the story.
The universal engagement curve isn't a writing issue - it is something which writing, game design, and other things make use of.
But the way engagement works in video games is vastly different from the way that engagement works in writing, because it is an interactive experience.
Consider, for instance, narrative pacing. How do you pace the narrative in a sandbox game properly, when the player can potentially run around for hours in the wrong direction doing other things?
Writing is only a very small component of the game process in most games. The amount of time you spend writing for a game is miniscule compared to the amount of effort it takes to actually produce the game in almost all instances. The man-hours spent on writing are quite rightly dwarfed by everything else.
So yeah, it is way easier on the writing end of things. Creating a large, detailed 3D area is vastly more difficult than writing two different conversations in terms of time spent. Creating two entire missions, or two sets of enemies, depending on narrative choices is more work than creating said narrative choices, almost always.
This is why games tend to not really give you real choices - in Mass Effect, for instance, no matter what choices you make, you still end up playing through all the same missions.
Another way of looking at it - look at My Little Pony:Friendship Is Magic. How many people are involved in the writing of the story? Usually, there is one writer, the story editor, and two directors. How many people are involved in the actual animation of the episode? How many are involved in the voice acting? How many are involved in other aspects of production?
If I wanted to create an alternate ending for an episode, the amount of writing involved would pale in comparison to the work in doing the rest of it.
And TV shows are more dependent on writing than video games are.
1968398
There are three aspects of this.
The first is that, generally speaking, unless you are being hired by an expert, they have to rely on the opinions of other experts as to how good you are - this is why references are so important! The person who hires you to be an engineer may not be an engineer themselves, and thus, to evaluate your ability, they call your old coworkers and see if you're awesome or not, as well as look at the success and failure of your previous projects.
The second, however, lies in the distribution of quality produced by any individual, which is likely to be somewhat randomized. That is to say, sometimes you will produce your very top quality work, sometimes it will be middling, and sometimes it will be lower. Some people might be very inconsistent - they're just as likely to produce something exceptionally above their skill level as below it. Others might be very consistent - they turn in stuff around their skill level most of the time, and sometimes put in something above or below.
If you consider Sturgeon's Law, then, you have to consider that only the very best stuff is in that top 10%, and many people likely only put one or two things out into that category because they just aren't that good - they got lucky once or twice. Some people never do. Some inconsistent people might put in several and produce several things which are dire (see also: George Lucas, Howard the Duck). And some people who are really good might consistently produce things which are top notch, with only the occaisional work they produce fallng out of that category.
The more you polish something, the better it is likely to be (assuming you are actually polishing usefully), so something which has less polish is less likely to end up in that 10% category and be comparable.
And given that most of the time, you are hiring employees based on past performance, rather than paying them up front for future performance, you cannot ensure that you're going to get their best work every time.
The third thing is that the reason that 90% of stuff is "bad" is because it is lower quality but still makes enough money to be worth selling, even though it isn't top notch.
Yeah, but the paid guy is likely to be better, and will be better the majority of the time.
And a wise man, who knows little about fiction, is going to pick the person with the experience, and they'll be more likely to be right.
Because it falls into the same pattern as other such stories do. Note that it isn't a bad thing - there's nothing wrong with writing stories like this. In fact, it is an excellent way to get attention. It does not, however, have much bearing on how good the story actually is - I've seen very terrible stories get in excess of 700 upvotes solely on the basis of a premise which isn't even really well addressed in the first chapter.
Do you think that Sedimentally Yours would have been so highly rated if it wasn't out right after the Maud Pie episode, had a terrible pun in the title, and had a ridiculous premise? No, it wouldn't have. But that doesn't make it a bad story - it means he released it at the right time. My own Maudern Poetry likely benefited from the same bump, though it never made the feature box (though it did get quite a few upvotes because a bunch of external sites linked to it).
I'm not saying that the story is bad. I'm saying that it is overated relative to its "goodness" in terms of writing quality, whereas a story like, say, Rainbow Dash Gets An Abortion is underrated relative to its "goodness" because of the premise of the story.
You can do it too! If you go to any story, you can click on the little "statistics" button (the thing that looks like the little bar chart) and in the dropdown, it will show the source of the referrals in a pie chart, as well as a listing.
1968517
I suppose I forget that many folks here are minors and/or value their relative anonymity.
Seeing as I'm the Titanium Dragon most everywhere, and my RL name is Googleable in connection with such, it is more of a pseudonym/self-chosen name/title than it is a means of concealing my identity.
1968170
Meh, being a good writer isn't about getting paid or being showcased. "Good" is subjective (here we go), good is an opinion and that can only be judged by an individual. Therefore it's pointless arguing the criteria of a good writer because it's all just opinion and nothing is established in concrete.
That being said, if you're asking whether or not he's good based on a non-individual factor like society or a group of people liking his work, where do you draw the line? Does he get to be good because one aspie liked his story? how about a group of autists? or maybe because it got featured. Or maybe he won't be good until he starts getting paid to write, meaning that there are very, very few "good" writers in the world today, and regardless if you may hate what they write and it's sub-par in your eyes, they're still good writers. I think the issue is that you're holding your standard for good writing as a universal one instead of a personal one, which depends on the situation at hand. if he's trying to get into a video game business then no he's not a good writer because he isn't getting paid. Otherwise on this site he is a good writer because he has high statistics and what he writes is just frankly good (in my opinion, 1 autist approved so far).
So in this context lets just say he's a good writer because lots of people have read his shit and thought, "huh, this is pretty funny, guys a good writer".
1968250
James Portnow from Extra Credits has a pretty good video on game writing:
Even if the topic is "Bad Writing", it talks about the issues surrounding writing for games.
But the writer still need to understand it in order to properly develop and write for the narrative of the game. And that's why usually if the scope of the project (and thus workload) is small enough, the person who came up with the idea is the one handling it since he/she is the one most familiar with the big picture, so to speak.
Whether the game really need a story ultimately boils down to the game design as well and what the designer wants to achieve with the game.
1969046 Yeah, I really like that Extra Credit's video. They've got a couple other ones on game writing that are also really good.
1968544
Hmm, once again I think you and I agree on much more than we think we do, we're just getting caught up in picking on particulars here.
I wasn't arguing for how writers--or people in general--are hired in the real world or why (i.e. the importance of references), but rather was pointing out that this is never a clear indication of prowess, at least when it comes to writing. The supposed truth of Sturgeon's Law is one signifier of this (and yes yes, I'm not forgetting your arguments and reflections about it), along with how critics are prone to decrying works which are later celebrated, and publishers rejecting works which, when finally accepted, become classics. Consider the beloved Watership Down by Richard Adams, which was turned down by six different publishers. Since being accepted, it has garnered the Carnegie Medal (among other awards) and seen adaptations into film, television, theater, and more.
I cite this example to hopefully help illustrate that failing or succeeding to get paid or published is never a clear indication of how good a writer is. Sometimes it means you are, sometimes it doesn't. That's all I'm saying. If it always was undeniable proof of one's ability, then Watership Down was a bad book while it was rejected six times, until it was finally accepted and then became good--but such a claim is ridiculous, as the quality of it didn't suddenly change with its reception by the publishers. We would say that it was always a good story, but not everyone with money realized or thought so.
So again, to avoid confusion, yes, being professionally paid or published certainly increases your chances of being an objectively good writer, but does not guarantee it in any way. I really don't think we're disagreeing on anything here.
As far as PDP...you're still making a claim you haven't really proved (which doesn't make it untrue, simply unproven), and that is that the majority of the story's ratings derive from its title and premise alone, as opposed to its objective quality. You can only theorize about this. To prove it, you'd have to question everyone who added it to their favorites or who clicked the like button and learn whether the reason they did so was due to the premise and title only, and not how the story carried that premise out (i.e. its quality). Until you have that information, all you can do is theorize about it, and not attempt to make objective claims. Is it possible the majority of PDP's ratings come from its title and premise? Sure. Do we know? No, we don't. Just because it has similar trappings to other stories which we claim to be popular based solely on their cover, so to speak, doesn't mean it is one of those.
And yeah, I'm in no way claiming you think it's a bad story. I also wholeheartedly agree that a story's popularity in no way guarantees its quality. A popular story can be bad, or it can be good. Its popularity may increase the chances it's objectively good, but by how much is up for debate.
However, we do not know which category PDP falls into, objectively--whether it's popular and good, or popular and bad or mediocre. We can say so subjectively (as in, "I think PDP stinks, so therefore I say it falls into the category of popular but bad"--which implies its popularity is due to surface elements like the title or premise). But until we know why nearly everyone clicked the favorites or like button, we simply can't say for sure. That's really all I'm saying here. *shrugs*
Oh, excuse me while I remove my foot from my mouth...
Say whaaaaaaaaat. Well, that's what I get for never really bothering to click the statistics button, I suppose. Look at that, you learn something new everyday.
1969450
I understand that nothing is 100%. The problem is that this is what is sometimes referred to as the Galilean fallacy - Galileo was persecuted for his ideas, but was proven correct (which is actually an oversimplification of what happened, as Keppler, who was around at the same time, was actually far closer to correct than Galileo was with his elliptical orbits, and Galileo's persecution was probably linked to the fact that his character Simplicio could be seen as an attack on the Pope); I am persecuted for my ideas, therefore I must be correct too. The problem is that the vast majority of the time, the people whose ideas are rejected and who are made fun of for their ideas being stupid are, in fact, utterly wrong. Your ideas being rejected is much more likely to be a case of your ideas sucking than everyone else being wrong.
Anything you do is always subject to some degree of error. Publishers are not 100% perfect, flawless instruments of separating the chaff from the wheat; they do reject things which are good and accept things which are bad.
That being said, they do much better than chance. Most of what they reject IS bad; most of what they accept IS better than what they reject. And it should also be remembered that, in some cases, they reject things for other reasons than quality alone - they are trying to make money selling things, after all, and thus market conditions are also a factor in their decisions. They aren't always right in those judgements either, but it is important to remember.
The other issue is that people frequently end up revising their works after they've been rejected. This means that something which was rejected six times may well have been revised six times until it was finally in a good enough state that someone accepted it. A great example of something which later went on to be a great production was Star Wars, which was rejected several times... but if you actually look at the state Star Wars was in at the time it was submitted, the studios were totally right in rejecting it, as the finished film ended up looking little like the work which was rejected in many respects, and the studios which rejected him had correctly predicted that Lucas was going to overrun his budget. Lucas himself admitted that the only reason Fox grabbed onto the film was because they were investing in him, not the film he was peddling; it took him several years to actually get the film into a state where it could be produced.
But of course, such things are forgotten, and people like telling the story of someone overcoming the odds and proving everyone else wrong and themselves to be an overlooked genius, because that is a much more interesting story than "I kept getting rejected over and over again and kept improving my work until it was good enough" to most people.
This is not to say that good works are not rejected and later accepted elsewhere by someone with greater vision, but it is to say that these stories are very frequently oversimplified for the sake of drama.
It is also worth remembering the variability thing I noted before in a previous post; say someone submits something to you that is similar to other works which have failed or been bad or what have you, and there isn't anything obviously different about this one, even if the thing later on proves to be successful, you still made the correct choice in rejecting it based on the information you had. This is like people who back out of the million dollar question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but their guess "would have been" right - they felt that the risk of $400k outweighed the reward of $500k, and while their guess turned out to be right, it doesn't change their calculation in the moment, when there was still hidden information. It is much like if you have a set of lucky lottery numbers and choose to stop playing the lottery, and the next week those numbers come up - you still made the right choice in not playing the lottery because the value of a lottery ticket is less than you pay for it, and even though you "would have won", you had no way of knowing that at the time, and therefore still made the correct decision.
But I suppose I have digressed a bit at this point. Suffice it to say that while publisher rejection is not a 100% mark of badness, it really is a strike against the value of whatever work you submitted to them.
1970133
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I think where our differences lie here is in the emphasis or significance we place on "professional opinion", and that's totally fine. Really, it's one of those topics you could write a book on.
I see you've written nine stories here on fimfiction; ever plan on trying to go pro and publish anything, whether book, essay, article, short story, etc? I've often considered it myself, but I dunno.
1970367
Publish things, yes, but not fiction.
I might try my hand at that eventually, but we'll see.
1971788
Oh, nonfiction then? Research? Good luck either way, of course.
/me keeps waiting for this to turn into an April Fool's joke.
/me reaches the end of the post.
Oh. Yeah.
Anyway, I disagree on one point - that no reader would guess the degree of effort spent balancing seemingly silly stories. I think I have a fair handle on that.