Learning to Love the Pain

When you’re not in charge of the story, often the story’s in charge of you.

A Bit of Background

I remember back in the early days of working on “Dragon Age: Origins” (before that was even its title) when I was asked to make the new game’s setting. It’s not the sort of task one gets assigned very often, and in this case it didn’t come with a lot of direction beyond ‘make something fantasy-ish…but your version of fantasy’. Lead Designer James Ohlen and I had chatted about some of the possibilities, after which I went off and made a world in the time-honored fashion of any nerd who grew up playing D&D: with a bunch of crudely-drawn maps on napkins and reams of text filled with enough twee-sounding proper nouns to make your head spin.

I’d really warmed up to the task, after some initial trepidation. This was going to be my subversion of the fantasy genre, a world that was in the aftermath of its ‘Lord of the Rings’ era where dragons were dead and magic was waning. I could take all the tropes I disliked about fantasy as a genre and turn them on their head, say something about the genre itself! I was psyched.

James was less psyched, as it turned out. “Where’s the magic?” he asked, after which I quickly learned the difference between creating a setting that made for interesting reading on the page and one that made for something around which you could build an interesting game. I grudgingly began to iterate based on his feedback, inching towards the version of the Dragon Age setting fans are familiar with today…but there was one change he wanted which didn’t sit very well with me: he wanted an “evil horde”, some ubiquitous enemy like the standard fantasy orcs which the player wouldn’t feel bad about killing. Dragon Age fans will recognize this role as what eventually became the darkspawn — but, back then, they simply didn’t exist. There was no such thing in the world I’d created.

I’ll admit: I balked. It ran smack against the very theme I’d tried to establish. I didn’t want to figure out how to do it, I just didn’t want to do it. I made arguments, I whined, I even made a couple of proposals which were so obviously stupid I was inwardly hoping they’d illustrate why the entire idea was bad. You know, the sort of things which undoubtedly made James question both my professionalism and my competence, and which he rightfully dismissed out of hand.

So I tried. I sat down and, rather than imagining all the ways in which adding orcs was the worst decision in all of human history, I instead tried to figure out if there was a version of orcs that…maybe I wouldn’t mind so much. Eventually I thought of an idea where these weren’t sentient monsters so much as a plague, a reoccurring event that threatened the world on an irregular basis in the same manner the Thread threatened Anne McCaffrey’s Pern (my nerd roots are showing, pardon me). That…that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? In fact, I could think of several spin-offs that would be kind of interesting for the setting’s history, a sort of periodic “purge” which would make for more interesting reading than a litany of “king X did Y” entries.

So I asked James: would it be okay if, instead of orcs, I did this “living plague” idea I was more excited about? I don’t remember his actual response, but it boiled down to “yes, I am indeed okay with you doing an implementation you will make interesting rather than the one you would make boring and crappy.”

I was startled, but it seemed obvious in retrospect. Do my job well rather than do my job poorly? That’s what you want from me? In my defense, I was pretty new at the whole Lead Writer gig.

The Lesson Learned

What lesson did I learn from that? It’s one that I continued to learn throughout my career as a writer and narrative designer, which is that — despite this being a creative position — you don’t always get your druthers. You won’t always be handed choices you personally would have opted for, or be given assignments you find inspiring or even all that interesting.

I’m sure this is something writers in almost any field where collaboration is required would recognize, though it’s doubly important in gaming where the limitations come at you from numerous directions. Not only will you have creative directives from your boss (or your boss’s boss), there are technical limitations applied by the game itself. There are requirements demanded by the fact this is a game and not just a story, one which must include gameplay and player agency. Many of these will appear after you’ve already done a bunch of work creating your perfect narrative, in fact. A full 75% of a game writer’s job is hacking and suturing their own story to solve problems which have nothing to do with narrative quality, to make the best of issues even when the result is less than ideal. Even when it makes you want to flip tables in rage and declare the entire project a lost cause. You get over it and figure out the best way to proceed because the rest of the team desperately needs you to. You have your part to play, just like they do.

This applies to the individual game writer in a lot of ways, even if they’re further down the chain of command — indeed, perhaps especially so. A new writer is likely to receive tasks nobody else wants to do, or have parts of the story assigned to them they had no hand in creating. Ideally one gets to form content right from the get-go, but things are rarely ideal. Often you work with the hand you’re dealt, and the point of you being a professional writer as opposed to an amateur (or someone on the Internet who looks at the finished product and opines how they would have done better — I, too, wish I could make all my decisions based on knowledge of how they’d turn out in the end, that would be fantastic) is figuring out how to be creative on demand.

Is this a long-winded, writerly version of “when given lemons, make lemonade”? Perhaps, but allow me to impart some of the things I often tell new writers I’ve hired on:

• Find a way to make the task your own. Figure out how much leeway you have to change things and make the tweaks — even if they’re small ones — which will turn it into something you love. Maybe a character becomes a type you’ve always wanted to write, maybe it’s a change to the theme, or a scene is inserted which makes it more interesting.
• From my perspective as the boss, I want my writers to figure out how to get excited about their task. I don’t want them to wait for me to get them excited. If they come to me with proposed changes that will make their task more interesting for them, I’m always willing to let them do it so long as the requirements of that task (the things which can’t change) are met. It is always a challenge to get new writers to the point where they feel brave enough to do this, however. Most will take a task they don’t understand or don’t like and do it exactly as offered, without question, ending in a mediocre result because they think that’s what I want. It’s not. I don’t want strict obedience, I want good work, and, as Lead Designer Preston Watamaniuk once told me, “writing is jazz”. You don’t follow a recipe, you follow your muse
• Sure, not every boss is like me, and you’ll find some are micro-managers who want control over every minute aspect of the work. That might mean your leeway to make changes is less, but shouldn’t stop you from finding ways to express yourself. Play with the cadence of the dialogue, the language, make the writing itself the thing in which you find joy.
• Can it be hard sometimes? Yes, absolutely. The point is to not spend all your time trying to figure out how to get around your limitations. Focus on what you love rather than what you don’t, or you will spend more time whining than actually writing. If you want to really annoy your lead, spend as much time as possible telling them how you can’t do the task you’re assigned. It’s an excellent way to get less of those tasks in the future.

Perhaps all of this seems really obvious to folks out there…but a big part of me doubts that. So many people seem to assume that a creative job on a game means it is one of creative control, that the narrative in the end product is that way because you as the creative person deemed it must be so, when the reality is that your job is one of creative management. You take a vision and you nurture it through all the hurdles of game development. You act as the champion for the narrative, one it sorely needs because everyone else on the team is focused on their own areas, and each one of their solutions is likely to drop yet another problem in their lap.

But you work with it, because — at the end of the day — a good writer or narrative designer separates themselves from the rest by managing to keep alive something creative and good in the game even after all the bruising it receives. Have I always been successful at that, personally? Not always, but I’ve succeeded often enough to know a good end result is worth the challenge.