It's an industry which appeals mainly to 18-35 year old males, has a huge following all around the world and has even made it into the movies (though most of them have been atrocious). It's quite often categorised and chastised as being of no social value, frequently violent and based upon preposterous, simplistic concepts, or cliched genres with elves, orcs, aliens, super heroes and ice cold killers.
It's not really taken seriously, it's certainly not art and there's something a little shameful about admitting to still enjoying it if you're a grown up.
Not another rant about games for a change - but comics.
Link to image.
At the end of last year, SG.biz bumped into Gordon Rennie. Author and comics writer for 2000AD and Warhammer. Gordon recently took a step into the games world, thanks to his involvement in the script for Rebellion's Rogue Trooper, which was published last year, as well as couple of other projects which, being games, never actually happened in the way they were supposed to.
Gordon is an interesting guy, with a lot to say about the world of comics, the state of writing in the games industry and the general state of the 'arts' in Scotland.
We took time off from our hurly-burly schedule of gallery openings (him) and trawling dubious RSS feeds (us) and spoke to him about it all...
Hi Gordon, OK, let's ask the obvious first question for a games site. How
did you first get involved in writing for videogames?
Someone
at Lost Boys Games - now Guerilla - really liked this nasty future
war comic strip called Glimmer Rats that I'd written, and
tracked me down on the interweb thingy to ask me if I was interested
in working on the script for Killzone, which was still in
early development then. That experience ended slightly unhappily - I
was one of the thousands crushed beneath the wheels of the Killzone
juggernaut as it slowly inched its way along the road to completion -
but I did get to hang out in Amsterdam, meet Rutger Hauer and get a
peek behind the curtain at the surprisingly half-arsed way some games
are put together.
How
does writing for games differ from writing in other, non-interactive
media? Are there any problems in particular which are unique to
videogames?
You're
not master of your own domain in games writing - i.e. it's very much
a team effort, and you have to be responsive to the developer's
wishes. In that respect, it's not much different from writing film
screenplays - the more money's at stake, the greater the number of
people whose input you're obliged to listen to - although the
technical limitations of what you can and can't do are different, and
that’s something you have to learn about quickly. In comics, I can
blithely write a scene where a thousand dinosaurs come running over a
hill, and the artist can get on with drawing it, because comics have
an unlimited special effects budget. If I write the same thing in a
film screenplay, the producer has a fit and wants to know how we’re
going to pay for that. If I write it into a games script, the art
department hunt me down and kill me because they’re the ones have
to design and build all the models for it.
Have
you found the industry responsive to professional writers within the
games industry?
You’re
joking, right? Regular articles in places like Edge might regularly
decry the lack of professional writing or scripting in the industry,
and publishers and developers might join in the public hand-wringing
about the quality of games narrative or dialogue, but when it comes
to them putting their hands into their pockets to remedy the
situation, it can be a different story. When you approach developers
looking for freelance writing work, you’re often met with total
indifference or polite astonishment, as if the idea of hiring a
professional writer on their games has never occurred to them before.
Look at the games industry recruitment sites and see that ads for
writer vacancies are as rare as hen’s teeth. The latest Edge had a
careers supplement to coincide with the London Games Fair; pages and
pages of features looking at every kind of job skill involved in
games development. Well, except for writing, of course. Despite
what’s said in public, it simply doesn’t seem to be something
many companies value.
Which
games do you consider to have great writing?
I
thought Resident Evil 4 had a pretty good narrative,
especially in the way the unlocked Ada missions wove in and out of
the main plot, adding to your appreciation of the game. I think the
GTA games make some great use of incidental humour - something too
many of their copycat imitators completely miss on - although some of
the dialogue makes you want to stick pins in your eyes, and there's
too many cut-scenes that can best be described as "various
unpleasant people shouting at each other".
The
games industry has a reputation for poor writing in games. Do you
think this is fair?
Pretty
much, since very few games are written by writers. If you want a
plumbing job done, you call a plumber. In the games industry, when
you need plot, dialogue and characterisation done, who do you get to
do it? Why, a level designer, mission scripter or a pal of the
producer’s, of course.
I was playing a game recently, which I won't name - okay, it was Gangs of London on the PSP - and you'd swear the dialogue was written as an afterthought by whoever was around the office that day, possibly even the guy that delivers the sandwiches.
It's crazy. Development budgets for games reach into six or even seven figures, and yet it's a major hassle for a lot of developers to spend a couple more grand to bring in one more professional to do the same kind of professional job that the other very talented people working on the game are doing. I don't kid myself on that I can do mission scripting or level design so why do these guys think they can do what I've been doing for a living for fifteen years?
Are
there any comics or character you'd like to see make the jump into a
videogame?
Sticking
close to home, I think there's a lot of IP potential in the 2000AD
stable of characters. Rebellion's initial Dredd game was a misfire,
but Rogue Trooper benifited from the learning curve on Dredd -
hiring a professional writer being part of that curve, and paid off
by getting them a Best Screenplay BAFTA nomination - and from having
more love and attention lavished on it. Classic series like
Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock, ABC Warriors,
Robohunter and perhaps more recent ones like Nicolai
Dante and Sinister-Dexter could all make great games,
having distinct, visually-interesting lead characters and an immense
amount of backstory and strongly-realised fictional universe concepts
to draw on. There's a lot of sly or black humour - always a 2000AD
trademark - in them all as well, which I think games need more of.
Do
you think there’s any scope for movement in the other direction -
games or character moving into comics?
There's
already been a fairly piss-poor Tomb Raider comic series. Far
more people already play games than read comics, so it would really
be more of an exercise in bringing in extra license revenues than
expanding brand awareness into other media. To be honest, I think
licensed novels and novelisations – Halo, Resident Evil
and World of Warcraft have already done this – are probably
a better way to expand on the background of your game world and fill
in the gaps in a game’s backstory. Something like GTA, with such a
distinctive and popular game world, would be ideal for this. Imagine a
series of slick, violent GTA pulp-crime novels, detailing Salvatore
Leone’s rise to power, or what happened to Tommy Vercetti before he
arrived in Vice City.
Digital
distribution systems such as Steam and Xbox Live promise to make
episodic gaming a distinct possibility. Do you see this as an
opportunity to perhaps move out of the basic 'plot' type writing into
new areas?
MMORGs
and episodic gaming are going to feature gameworlds that evolve the
longer the player is involved in them – new games content is going
to have to be continually created – new characters, plots and
subplots, emerging backstory details etc – to keep the players
engaged with the game, just in the same way that, say, soap operas or
continuing TV series have to keep on generating new material for
their audience. Someone’s going to have to create this stuff, and
keep on creating it. It’s also not much different from writing a
long-running continuing comic strip like Judge Dredd. From a writing
or storytelling point of view, there’s a lot of potential there,
with the narrative, reacting to what the players are doing in the
gameworld, evolving in all sorts of unexpected directions.
What
would be your ideal job when writing for games?
A
horror game. It’s the genre I like the most, and I’ve written a
fair amount of horror stuff in comics and other mediums – and won a
Borders Books Best Graphic Novel award for one of them – but so far
nothing in the games biz.
What's
your take on the state of the games industry in Scotland?
You
don't need me to remind anyone that it's taken a severe kicking in
the last few years. Real Time Worlds and the Rockstar North aside,
it seems to have collapsed back into almost a cottage industry again.
There seems to be a thriving mobile games industry here, with
companies like Denki, but I'm afraid that sector of the industry
generally flies below my radar, mobile gaming not yet requiring much
in the way of professionally-constructed narrative.
Do
you think the comics or games businesses are treated with the same
respect and understanding as other areas of the media (tv, movies and
books for example)?
Hey, if
the games industry has a hard time gaining any real credibility as a
creative medium – although the large amounts of cash it can
generate commands a certain amount of growing, if grudging, respect –
then you should try working in comics. Games are going through the
same process that comics – and, before that, a host of other
things, including early rock’n’roll – all went through.
Dismissed as being for kids, and with no artistic merit, and then, as
their popularity grows, comes the nannyish fretting that their
creators are out to corrupt the minds and morals of children.
Luckily, things seem to be slowly changing. At the risk of being a BAFTA bore, I know from personal experience that BAFTA now acknowledging games alongside cinema and TV is a big step forward. The funding mandarins at Scottish Screen wouldn’t have been at all impressed if I had nominated for some mickey mouse games set of games industry awards, but the BAFTA thing definitely caught their attention. I mean, it almost makes games sound like a real, proper, grown-up creative industry.
What
do you think could be done to improve support for alternative media
such as comics and games in Scotland?
You
mean through public funding channels? I've currently got a movie
pitch grinding its way through the decision-making process at
Scottish Screen, the idea being to scare some lottery cash out of
them to pay for script development on a low-budget Scottish horror
film. Scottish Screen's part of the Scottish Arts Council and we're
getting a hard enough time asking them to put money into something as
culturally unedifying as a horror film, so I can only imagine the
reaction you'd get asking for money to publish a comic or develop a
computer game.
I mean, comics and computer games - they're just violent rubbish aimed at children, aren’t they?
I really can't see it happening with comics - the UK comics industry is pretty much dead on its arse, and the news-stand readership for them just isn't there anymore - but you could probably build a decent case for scamming up some investment from Scottish Enterprise for games development, not as a creative endeavour but as supporting an industry that, UK-wide, now brings in more in export revenue than the British film industry.
But, then, I'm just a hack writer, so what the hell do I know?
Jack
McConnell is at home on a Friday night, with a pizza an Xbox game and
a stack of comics. What's he playing, what's he reading and what are
his pizza toppings?
He'll
be reading Scottish dope humour comic Northern Lights, playing GTA -
the most successful thing to come out of Edinburgh since Sean
Connery, and at least Rockstar North are still actually resident in
Scotland - and munching on a Meat Feast pizza with extra meat
topping.
Which
of your stories/character would you most like to see become a
videogame?
I
dunno. Maybe Caballistics, a guns’monsters occult
conspiracy comic series I write, that’s already spun off into its
own series of novels. Or White Trash, one of the first things
I ever wrote, a violent and funny road movie story about a killcrazy
psycho called ‘The King’ who’s on his way to Vegas for his gig
comeback gig. How I still treasure the letter we received from the
Elvis Presley estate’s lawyers about that one…
Finally,
if anyone out there is looking for a good writer, who should they be
talking to?
Why, a
BAFTA-nominated one, of course.
I'm definitely adopting several new mantras from the post & the comments! Thank you, thank you! I use these quite a bit: Everyone is wrong about the future (my way of reminding myself that I don't & can't know what's up ahead or control it, ditto for all of us); Mistakes will be made (removes the personal blame angle, mine or others); and Courage, courage, courage, cowboy (which I saw written on a very whimsical painting, which included a giant rabbit, a cactus forest and a teeny tiny cowboy atop the bunny).
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