Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986)


As a video game writer, you will draft mission scripts, battle dialogue, in-game text, and maybe a trailer or two. Hopefully you’ll have a seat at the table during pre-production, and throughout development you’ll work alongside designers creating missions. But you won’t tell the story, not by yourself, anyway. fffff

Video game development is a hilariously complicated endeavor. How dramatically a story can be shaped by time and resources still amazes me. As a game writer, you should be ready to solve production problems with creative story and character solutions. Reason being — it takes tons of developers working in tandem to create a new character or to put together a single mission.

At the end of the day, AAA video game storytelling is a co-op game, not a solo mission. And you’ll need some storytelling allies on your perilous journey.

Story Allies: Narrative Safety in Numbers

As in any successful co-op party, you’ll need allies of various skills and disciplines by your side. Here’s why:

  1. Different storytelling perspectives strengthen how a game’s story is experienced by the player.
  2. Each discipline has expertise in knowing how to use available resources to tell a story.
  3. More story allies means a greater chance of success during the unpredictable game development journey.

Every story decision you want to make as a writer will require your fellow developers’ time and resources, whether that be a concept artist, animator, 3D modeler, programmer, designer — you name it. Each discipline has some effect on a game’s story and characters, and it’d take quite a few articles to cover them all. But on a day-to-day basis, my story allies almost always include concept artists, mission designers, and level designers.

Concept Artists — Visual Storytellers

Concept artists create first impressions.

If I want to pitch a new character, I almost always reach out to a concept artist first. I’ll send some quotes from the character, a short backstory, maybe some thoughts on what the character looks like. The concept artist will ask a few questions. Does the character have a pet? A tattoo? Where are they from? An hour later, a concept artist will have made an amazing piece of environmental art or character sketch. Concept artists create pure magic, and they’ve taught me a lot about creating characters.

But the most important lesson I’ve learned from working with concept artists is the power of a first impression. Even before your character opens his mouth to say his first carefully-crafted lines, his appearance will tell a player everything he needs to know. In the concept stage, all aspects of a character are explored.

  • Shape language and silhouettes (the big read of a character)
  • Costuming and accessories (clothing, gear and equipment)
  • Personality (via facial expressions or posture)

Because a character’s visual design creates such a powerful first impression, staying in good communication with your concept artists is crucial. Otherwise, the poverty-stricken character you’re writing in secret might end up sporting a top hat. After a character starts down the production pipeline, it becomes more and more costly to change a character’s appearance. Usually, if something’s going to change later in production, it’s your dialogue.

Mission Designers — Interactive Storytellers

Mission designers wield the verbs.

A mission designer views story through the lens of a player’s actions, and how those actions advance the mission. Video game verbs are often seemingly limited, and usually include: go, interact, fight. It’s the context that makes those limited verbs interesting:

  • Go to a fun house run by nuns (not a real thing, not part of Borderlands 3).
  • Interact with a talking jukebox (ditto).
  • Fight the guy who stole your sandwich (no promises, jk).

Mission designers are natural story advocates, though their focus is on a player’s moment by moment experience. Clarity is paramount to mission design. Reason being, if a player doesn’t understand what they’re being asked to do, the next question they’re liable to ask is why they should bother with it. Just as concept artists help a writer create the right first impression, mission designers work to sharpen motive in the interest of both entertainment and clarity.

It took me a long time to truly understand why mission designers are so invested in story. The reason is stupidly simple. A mission designer will play their mission more times than almost any other developer in the studio. They will labor over pacing and wording of every objective. That’s their job! But consider this. If that clever joke you tell that gets a laugh the first time, see how funny it is the tenth time. Or the hundredth.

 I try to get drinks with my mission designers as often as possible. It makes it easier when we come to blows later in the week about whether to cut a line or keep it. And in a medium where space is usually tight, a single line can sometimes make the difference between a vivid character and a forgettable one… so you’re gonna need all the space you can get…

Level Designers — Environmental Storytellers

Level designers determine the space.

Of course, they don’t do this in a vacuum. Level designers work with writers and mission designers to plot out story beats. I drop by my LDs’ desks from time to time to ask for a set piece, a blood trail, a crashed ship — any props I might need to sell a mission or character. Some level designers love storytelling, and some don’t. I say this only because, by nature, mission designers have to be invested in story to some degree. But level designers have other masters: exploration and combat. 

However, whether they want to be or not, level designers are natural environmental storytellers, because they’re most familiar with the art assets at their disposal to help you tell a story. I’ll come to a level designer and say, “I’d love something super foreboding.” Ten minutes later, you’ve got yourself a half-sandwich on a plate, lathered in blood. Story gold!

The potential conflict between a writer and a level designer often comes down to space, and it’s something I am constantly advocating for. A character needs time to share an amusing anecdote. I’ve got one more joke to squeeze into a mission. Without the proper space to tell your story, you either have to cut back or put the player in a slow-moving elevator, and no one wants that, right? Right? Right…

Cooperative Storytelling

A richer character backstory can enhance the significance of a mission. An extra line here or there might turn a rote fetch quest into something special. That’s what I believe, anyway. Day by day, I roam the office forming story alliances, hoping to recruit my fellow developers to invest their time and resources in the pursuit of memorable characters or unforgettable missions. Fortunately, my fellow developers at Gearbox appreciate how a game’s narrative elements enrich a player’s experience. But as a game writer, you can’t do it alone. Nor should you. So choose your allies wisely!



Being a professional video game writer is one of the best jobs around. Period.  I’d love to see the look on my six-year-old self’s face if I told him I’d be writing video games one day. But here’s the real talk. The path to becoming a video game writer is tough — and different for everyone. But in case it helps, here’s how I got started. My video game career began after a hilariously bad birthday.

The Bad Birthday Pivot

My girlfriend and I had recently come back to the States from Japan after the Tsunami of 2011. I’d left a soon-to-be amazing teaching job in Tokyo, the type of gig an aspiring novelist dreams of: short hours, great pay, plenty of time to write on the side. But with my family’s concerns over the Fukushima situation, we came home instead (blowing much of my savings in the process) to Florida to crash with my parents. The plan was to recoup a bit and then figure out next steps. Then my girlfriend and I broke up, a week before my birthday. So, to review: Recent break-up. Unemployed. No savings. Living with parents.

Chrono Trigger

On the morning of my birthday, I dug through my closet, found our Super Nintendo, and fired up Chrono Trigger. Alongside the novels I’d read that shaped the type of novelist I wanted to be, video games had also impacted my imagination and sense of story, games like Final Fantasy IV and VI, and of course, Chrono Trigger

While I was playing, my mind drifted to my writing career, and how I wanted to be a working writer — that is, I wanted to pay the bills with my writing, rather than my writing being a “when I’ve got time” situation. Most writers go for TV and movies, incredibly competitive but potentially lucrative careers. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to move to Los Angeles.

I asked myself what I liked about storytelling in videogames. The answer was that I felt like I was part of the story, instead of an observer in someone else’s story. One writing career lesson I didn’t learn soon enough is that sometimes you have to pivot when one avenue isn’t working out, so, I said to myself, I should try to make it as a video game writer.

Then the inevitable question followed…  so how do you become a video game writer?

My First Strange Gig

I scoured game studio websites for an entire year, but I didn’t see many open game writer jobs available. Then, one day my brother told me about a guy he’d recently met looking for a writer. I sent a few sample scripts, which the team liked, and I was hired. It was a strange, ambitious, iPad game called Alfa-Arkiv.

Alfa-Arkiv

For this first gig, I wrote a series of fictional emails hidden within the app. You’d consider it a secondary or even tertiary story — imagine the types of emails you read while playing Deus Ex. The emails explored the backstories of several main characters. I suspected that most players wouldn’t read this content, but in video game writing you sort of have to have that mentality. Some people gobble up story at every opportunity, and others skip in-game text like the plague.

The value of starting your career by working on a small team is that you get to see the entire game develop right around you, day by day. You collaborate with people from every discipline. Even the discussions on how to market the game were new and exciting to me. Although Alfa-Arkiv wasn’t financially successful, it did manage to get recognition from CNET as one of the best mobile game of 2014, and more importantly, I learned a lot and cut my teeth with professional and very talented developers in the process. As the game was nearing completion, I started to look for other gigs, but again, there weren’t many game writer jobs being advertised.

If you don’t see a game writing job, try to find indie developers working on a game you’d like to write. That’s what I did, at least.

Kickstarting a Game Writing Career

I tracked tons of indie projects before eventually reaching out to a Mexican developer making a retro Zelda II throwback called Elliot Quest. Basically, I asked him if he needed help writing the story, and ended up helping him run a small but successful Kickstarter. In the meantime, I also jumped on a few other indie games. Of them, Elliot Quest was the only one to get a publisher and came out on most modern game platforms, including most recently the Nintendo Switch.

Elliot Quest

While I was working on Elliot Quest, I started taking notes on the games I was playing, analyzing story, character development, pacing, and what narrative tools the writers had at their disposal. I also began reading game design books like: Theory of Fun and The Art of Game Design.

As Elliot Quest’s development was wrapping up, I finally found a few video game writing jobs and applied to all of them. I received plenty of rejections, most of the time in the form of never hearing anything back. This is part of the entertainment industry, and certainly videogames. Competition is stiff. Getting noticed is a combination of hard work, who you know, and luck.  For a select few studios I got a writing test, and of those I interviewed with one or two companies. But no job offers.

I didn’t know many people in the game industry, other than a handful of indie developers. I had two indie game credits to my name. If I had to guess why my materials got noticed, it’d be that I wrote speculative scripts based on mainstream, popular games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Mass Effect. Although I’ve never written fan fiction, a spec script can be a powerful tool to demonstrate to potential employers that you can write in a particular voice or genre:

Never underestimate the power of a spec script.

Multitasking My Way to AAA

Armed with spec scripts, I got my first mid-sized studio job, a six-month contract working for Trendy Entertainment. My employment started right after some upheaval at the studio, after which I joined a pre-production team for Dungeon Defenders 2. I wrote a lot of lore and world-building documents, as well as character bios.

My Walking Dead Game

In 2013 I saw that the University of Texas at Austin was starting a video game fellowship, the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy: Free tuition and a living stipend, and directed by Warren Spector. There were only twenty spots, and I figured that a video game writer didn’t have a chance in hell of getting in. But I did.

Although I never took a coding class in college, I knew that having a more diverse skillset would both make me more attractive to potential employers as well as give me a better insight into how games are made – which would translate into my ability to write better video game stories. I took all the basic courses in code academy, and also began to (slowly) learn a game engine, Unity. Later, I’d use Unity to build interactive games (Telltale-Lite) but more interactive than, say, a Twine game. 

Anyhow, I also learned basic level design in Unity and completed as many tutorials as I could. Armed with my spec scripts, I applied to the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy and, to my surprise, got an interview. When I was speaking to Warren Spector, the inevitable question came up. What would I do if the game we decided to make didn’t need a story? Due to my work in Unity, I was able to say that I could jump onto level design or potentially even audio (I play guitar and piano, and have sub-par editing skills). I got in.

The Denius-Sams Gaming Academy is no more, and I killed it. Kidding. Unfortunately, the program only lasted two years, and I was in the first of two classes. Really, that the program isn’t around is a shame, because in a short nine months, so much video game wisdom was crammed in my head, not just by the program’s faculty (Warren Spector, Joshua Howard, and David Cohen) but also a myriad of veteran game developers who came to speak: Richard Garriot, David Bettner, Max Hoberman, and a host of other veteran developers

Nearing the end of the fellowship, the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy hosted a job fair, and Gearbox was one of the participating studios. Write for Gearbox, the studio who made Borderlands? Yeah, I’m in.

The Road to Gearbox

By now, I had an armada of materials, indie game credits, as well as my spec scripts, which I’d turned into short interactive games using Unity and a plug-in called Fungus. As luck would have it, Gearbox was looking for a writer — I say luck because posted AAA writing jobs are incredibly rare, amazingly competitive, and you should apply anyway. I landed a writing test, then a phone interview, then an on-site interview, and finally a job offer.

Gearbox

For most, becoming a game writer is a long, twisted path filled with tons of rejection (unless you catch a break) in which you’ll spend years working for just the opportunity to prove your writing chops. The honest truth is that there are a million factors that can ultimately determine whether you get that job or not. Who you know. The weather. So, my best advice is to:

Make your own games.

Reach out to indie studios. 

Be fearless. Embrace rejection. 

In the end, I got my current job at Gearbox after a ton of hard work, a lot of rejection, and some luck. That said, everyone’s path to game writing is different. But there’s an upside. Video game writers are part of a small, welcoming community. So, on your path to becoming a game writer, don’t be afraid to ask for advice along the way. 

Do you have advice on becoming a game writer?

Yup. Here goes.

1. Embrace rejection and listen to feedback:

First, becoming a game writer at a big studio is highly competitive, and there aren’t a ton of AAA game writing jobs out there. That said, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and it’s extremely rewarding. So in the end, it was worth all the rejection, the lows, and so on. But you’ve got to be willing to keep at it, despite how difficult it can be to actually land a job. I learned something from every writing test I took and every interview I landed. If you get feedback, listen to it! Getting honest and critical feedback on your writing is crucial to becoming better at your craft.

2. Put together a Portfolio of Spec Scripts:

Having a portfolio of spec scripts from popular games is the first thing I’d recommend putting together. When I was applying for jobs, I had a Mass Effect script, a Walking Dead script, etc. This helps demonstrate that you can jump into a pre-existing IP with already-established characters. You can write these in traditional screenplay format or use Twine. There are also unity plugins (like Fungus) that help you create a more interactive experience. I made a Walking Dead game in unity with some photos and a few SFX.

3. Acquire a wide variety of writing skills:

Scenes: A game writer (depending on the project) should be able to write both scenes (traditional screen-writing). These are really rewarding, but relish them – they’re few and far between (depending on the type of game you work on), and space is limited because cutscenes can be expensive to produce!

General VO: A lot of a game’s writing comes in the form of General VO — the type of instructions you get from a single character about where to go next, and why you’re going there, etc. To me, this sometimes feels like a mix between writing a radio play and stand-up comedy. Unless you’re working on a David Cage game, the majority of your writing will probably not be scenes.

Battle VO and Contextual VO: These are grids of condition VO based on what’s happening (my character spotted an enemy, I’m hurt, etc). Battle VO is really challenging, because the skill is really in writing the same thing twenty times while keeping it a) informative b) entertaining.

Flavor Text: In addition, having prose skills for all of the other sorts of materials you need in a game, like flavor texts, is handy. This sometimes feels like a mix between advertising and poetry – space is tight. Every word matters.

4. Work on Indie Games:

Reach out to indie devs and help them with writing. There are tons of amazing indie developers making incredible games – don’t be shy. I contacted a few indie devs with successful kick starters, for example, and offered my services. Every project has something to teach you.

I wrote for quite a few indie games (some for free, some paid) before getting my job like Alfa-Arkiv and Elliot Quest. A really good place to find potential projects you can work on is Kickstarter. That’s how I came to write Elliot Quest. Of course, it’s likely that you’ll end up working on games that are never released, but that’s just part of the…magical world that is game development. Gamedev is tough, people!

5. Acquire other skills:

I did a ton of code academy courses, just to understand how code works on a basic level – this has proved really useful in talking with coders and designers. Communication is a key component of game writing, and being able to explain an idea in ways that make sense to other devs is very important. I also read most of the basic game design books. But basically, the more skills you can acquire, the more valuable you are to a team. You don’t need to be an incredible artist or designer or coder, but speaking the language, understanding the fundamentals – goes a long way.