Game Design, Gears of War, Jobs, Metal Gear Solid
The Unappreciated Discipline of Narrative Design
Sam Lake is the lead writer behind Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake. His scripts helped propel the Max Payne series to positive reviews, and his writings will be equally essential to this new title’s success.
But it’s rare for developers to prioritize the role of a writer like this. Frequently sidelined as an afterthought, writers — also known as narrative designers, depending on your opinion — hardly ever work as closely with a development team as Mr. Lake does.
Rather than marginalizing writers, more developers should take Remedy’s approach and embrace them. We’ve seen the success of story-driven games like Metal Gear Solid. Narrative designers make games come alive, and we simply can’t afford to treat them like dirt anymore.
When I originally learned that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King would feature a greater emphasis on narrative storytelling, I couldn’t help but have concerns. While its predecessor The Burning Crusade came through with promises of fatter purples, flying mounts, and more, more, more, one of its weaknesses was the impact of the storyline. Meeting a bunch of fellows from Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal in The Burning Crusade was kind of neat, but I never really felt as if I belonged fighting Illidan. It was difficult to see how helping sick children and mending blue space-alien rejects helped liberate a people from Illidan’s tyranny, and despite the fact that my character was supposedly a hero, I didn’t feel all that heroic. In The Burning Crusade, I was a hero without friends or a real cause. Wrath of the Lich King changes all that. 