After attend­ing the Game Developer’s Conference Writer Summit in Austin a cou­ple of weeks ago, I have been increas­ingly deter­mined to make a slow career shift from web-related work to the video game indus­try and writ­ing.  I’m not going to stop build­ing web­sites yet.  But I want to start writ­ing in the field.

I’ve been think­ing about the pluses and minuses for myself, and I’ve made some lists to exam­ine my interest.4

First, why do I think I could break into the video game indus­try as a writer and be good at it?

• I have a proven track record as a writer with my short story mate­ri­als, as well as the Dr. Roundbottom project.
• As a web designer, I’m used to work­ing cre­atively in a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment.   The tran­si­tion to being part of a team in writ­ing will be an easy one for me.  I will be your word monkey.
• I have expe­ri­ence writ­ing for voice act­ing and direct­ing voice actors both through Escape Pod and Dr. Roundbottom.
• I am tech­ni­cally skilled and can write code, so when it comes to hook­ing dia­logue up to a game with in-house edit­ing tools, I can pick that up quite quickly and eas­ily.  I built sev­eral mod­ules for my own enter­tain­ment with the Neverwinter Nights tool set, so I’ve already had some expe­ri­ence here.
• My writ­ing often has a strong sense of voice, which is impor­tant for many types of game writing.
• I love video games, and games of all sorts.

And why do I even want to break into the video games indus­try as a writer?

• I enjoy work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively with oth­ers on larger projects.
• The pay per word is gen­er­ally much bet­ter than straight fic­tion writing.
• The audi­ence is there.  Top games sell mil­lions of copies.  I’m not going to be able to play in front of an audi­ence that size with short fiction.
• I love writing.
• I love video games, and games of all sorts.

But there are some poten­tial down­sides to the video game indus­try for me:

• Long crunch hours could sap my will to live if I’m not pre­pared for them.
• The pay may be more than fic­tion writ­ing, but it seems often less than web design (at least at this stage).
• Am I really pre­pared to write My Gorgeous Pony: The Magical Adventures II?
• Not entirely sure I have the full range of writ­ing tal­ents to make it.  I need to learn how well I can switch gen­res to gen­res that I don’t nor­mally write for.

With all that in mind, I’ve pur­chased a cou­ple of books on the indus­try, and they include chap­ter exer­cises.  As part of my process of explo­ration, I’m going to post the exer­cises and my attempts at them.  I plan to do 2 chap­ters of the Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing book a week, but I may shrink some of the projects in size or skip the larger ones that would take a con­sid­er­able amount of time. You’re all wel­come to play along at home with your own copies, and com­ment on what I do.     Or you can just ignore it entirely–that’s cool too.

At the very least, I hope you’ll keep me work­ing on it and poke me if I don’t keep on the project.  Wish me luck.  I’m going to need some of it in addi­tion to tal­ents I’ve yet to develop.  But it’s an excit­ing prospect, and one I look for­ward to exploring.

Tagged as: GDC, My Writing, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, video games