As more and more people become aware of the heavy cheese of Diablo 3’s story, there are calls for Blizzard to hire ‘new writers’ and all.
Video games are not and should not be a written medium. They are a visual medium. I honestly don’t see why a video game company would hire a writer in the first place.
But not all content creation comes from ‘writing’. Movies, for example, are controlled more by the director and not the writer. Visual mediums use visuals more than words to build up the universe. Simply ‘hiring writers’ isn’t the solution.
I do not think the cheesy content was the aim. I believe there are people in Blizzard who think it is honestly good stuff. They believe their new stories are great just like how Sakamoto was so convinced the story in Metroid: Other M was deep and fantastic. (Proir to Starcraft 2’s release, Metzen repeatedly panned Starcraft’s one story as poor and only good for its time while being hyped about Starcraft 2’s story. Don’t believe me? Watch his interviews.)
Interesting content creation (e.g. interesting writers) need to be interesting people first. You can’t just get drunk on your ‘inner geek’, watch anime all day, and expect to create quality content. Good writers (and I am using writers here for the term ‘content creators’) read all sorts of things and do not stay on one subject. Good writers also push themselves out of their comfort zone. They go to seedy areas, become friends with the drunks and prostitutes while simultaneously going to churches and ‘respectable institutions’, becoming friends with priests and community leaders. Just as a musician practices scales to nail the highs and lows of pitch, the writer needs to nail the highs and lows of the Human spirit.
Imagine stories (content) being a plant. The seed is the writer (content maker). The soil is the environment (the material the writer draws upon). It is a mistake to say the plant is caused entirely by the environment as many do in various biographies about people. The seed is the most interesting element.
One thing I have seen successful writers (and content creators) do is that they keep replenishing themselves. They read and consume things you cannot imagine which strengthens their output.
If you spent years of your life absorbing nothing more than comic books and pop culture movies, you will not create anything interesting. However, if you spend years of your life absorbing things like Shakespeare, the Bible, studies of Nature, math, etc. then the output will become stronger. The greater the foundation, the greater the tower of fiction can be.
Reality is a main ingredient. Writers know that reality is where everything interesting occurs. People who shrink from subjects because of how it may violate some ideological or emotional belief will never absorb reality and will never create anything interesting. History needs to be absorbed. The architect of the modern Star Trek universe, the writer for Best of Both Worlds, was an award winning journalist before he got into entertainment. The universe creator for Babylon 5 wrote radio plays and was a journalist beforehand.
Before we tar and feather Blizzard’s content makers, we need to know whether or not they are at fault or they were overruled by others in the company. The writing may be bad because they had their hands tied. But the general complaint remains the same: someone at the company does not have the correct mentality, and it is doing serious harm to the franchises… perhaps a turning point where all we can do is watch them rot and wither away at this point.
I guarantee that if you were to meet the individuals responsible for Blizzard’s latest content, you would find them uninteresting and dullards. They are probably locked away thinking that their anime and ‘nerd stuff’ is all cool stuff. But for content creation, you cannot stay with the inner geek.
Shigeru Miyamoto once gave the greatest advice to game developers by saying something like, “The best game developers are not those who just play a bunch of games. They have hobbies, experiences, out in the real world.” And all that flows back as fertile material to create new games. If I was hiring for a video game company, I would never hire anyone whose world limits went only as far as anime, comic books, and cliche nerd behavior. I would want, and insist, on people being interested in everything in the world. I would hire entertainers (which is what game developers are) not because they are interested but because they are interesting.
“But it is the norm for video games to have crappy stories.” It actually isn’t. When we look at the entire universe of gaming, from PONG to the present, we find either non-stories (Does PONG need a story?) or games that attempt to stimulate the imagination. Yar’s Revenge was just an Atari 2600 game but the manual was very interesting. And what little kid of the 80s didn’t dream of the universe presented in Super Mario Brothers whose writing never went beyond ‘Thanks Mario but the princess is in another castle?” The imagination of the players were stimulated. Think of why Star Wars started with Episode IV which everyone imagined what Episode I-III would be (and boy were people disappointed when the first trilogy came out).
The first video game creators were interesting people. There was no ‘game industry’. I am reminded of Richard Garriot, a son of two astronauts (imagine what type of environment and education he grew up with), looked at video games as a sort of ‘high tech art’. Think of Wright from Sim City and Sims about his outlook on the world. Or what about Sid Meir? Or Dani Bunton? These people were genuinely interesting people before they made interesting games. (In the case of Dani Bunton, who had a sex change, perhaps too interesting.)
The rot I see with video game development is what I see in many ‘creative writing classes’ across the country. Uninteresting people are coming to video game development and think making video games will be ‘interesting’. They are going about it backwards.
It is not that different than dealing with women. Losers with women are uninteresting men who think getting with the women will make them interesting. To the contrary, if they became interesting first, the women would show up without them having to work. It is a reason why some of the world’s best writers are the world’s best seducers.
Interesting people make interesting games. If your game is uninteresting, look at the people who made it. Are they interesting? Or are they dork boys?
Can anyone point to a major talent in radio, movies, television, or theater that is not an interesting person? Then why should it be any different for video games? Why hire someone who burned their youth doing mod work for games versus someone who actually had adventures? The one with adventures would be the one with stories to tell.