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.

Game writers generally don’t work with a title from start to finish. In an uncommon scenario, Sam Lake wrote for Max Payne since its inception, and he ensured the story remained consistent and true to an original vision throughout development. By contrast, most other writers are handed half-finished projects with stories already in place: “Oh, now that 90 percent of the game is done, we should probably get a writer to fix the story, shouldn’t we?”

The Max Payne series was known for its dark atmosphere and storytelling style, which was heavily influenced by film noir.

Rather than viewing writers as essential to the creative process, developers use them to flesh out prewritten mediocre plots (often written by a game designer), ones that are tailored to mechanically send players from one level to the next. In this way, most video game plots aren’t powerful the way they could be if real writers were included from the beginning. Stories are instead shallow and meaningless, because all a poor writer has to work with is a steaming pile of clichéd garbage.

This practice is being fought, however. To emphasize storytelling’s importance in video games, these days the industry refers to writers as “narrative designers.” Their job isn’t just to write dialogue or in-game text. It’s to humanize a game’s unreality, to flesh out a world and make it believable.

But by being alienated from much of the process, narrative designers can only achieve so much.

Despite being a great game, Marcus Fenix was a pretty shallow guy.

Take a game like Gears of War, in which narrative designer Susan O’Connor had to salvage a plot out of the game’s already-established premise. From the very beginning, story wasn’t a priority in Gears. So she worked around what the team already had, resulting in a surface-level story. What a missed opportunity. If she had been there from the beginning, a solid plot could’ve catapulted an already great game to legendary status.

Hideo Kojima, on the other hand, clearly had an essential storyline in mind throughout the development of Metal Gear Solid. The storyline takes no backseat in any of the series’ titles. Of course, Kojima has the luxury of being both a creative director and adept storyteller. So he was able to make story a priority from the outset. The same holds true for Tim Schafer of Psychonauts and Dan Houser of the Grand Theft Auto series.

But if you don’t have a director with kick-ass storytelling skills, the plot is lost in the equation. A writer is usually only hired after the fury of initial development, and he’s left to pick up the pieces as best he can.

So working on Alan Wake, Sam Lake is in a fortunate position. His early involvement allows for the story to take flight in ways that are otherwise unfeasible. Remedy gets how important a storyline can be, and having a bona fide writer in their ranks, making sure the plot holds together correctly, is a rare opportunity to raise the bar in video game storytelling.

Employing narrative designers to see a story through from beginning to end shouldn’t be the exception, but the norm. Lots of games have potential for strong stories, and they don’t need a Hideo Kojima to have them. All they need is a decent writer who can help flesh things out before it’s too late.