With the introduction of player voice in Mass Effect, BioWare is taking on change in its writing style and company culture. Kevin Barrett, Director of Design at BioWare Edmonton, shares insights on these changes in a company that established itself as the premier developer behind text-branching role-playing games such as Baldur’s Gate and continues to promote the importance of writing in games.

“It may not seem like a big deal, but giving the player’s character a voice has really opened the door to cinematic presentation of dialogue exchanges. As soon as you go from mute player responses to cinematic, interactive dialogue, the writer’s responsibilities evolve significantly.

As players of past BioWare titles know, it was the case in games like Baldur’s Gate that an NPC would deliver a line, and then the player would pick from an array of 3-6 responses. The psychology behind the selection of the response was split. Some players would role play and pick a response that suited their mood at the moment or best portrayed their avatar’s attitude. Others, however, would choose responses in order to min/max player benefits. This was particularly the case in games like Knights of the Old Republic, where you could pick up light side and dark side points based on dialog selections. As a result, writing for these games was very much entwined with mechanical game considerations.

Moving to the cinematic presentation of narrative in Mass Effect, where the player does not know exactly what his character is going to say (because of the paraphrasing system for dialog selection), min/maxing is obfuscated, moving players to be more concerned with ‘driving an emotional scene.’ So, the challenge changes for the writer in this case. The writer does not have to write in such a way as to infuse emotional context into the words. The digital actors are going to do that. The work of evoking emotional context is largely transferred to the cinematic designers, voice actors and voice directors. The writer is also less concerned with inferring the game mechanic consequence in the line. The writer instead has to write more in ‘television dialog mode,’ meaning the lines become shorter, and more concise, like the way we naturally speak. The writer is also now responsible for preparing the paraphrases of his lines. This is a new skill with its own set of rules that is currently working its way through our various writing teams.”

As the writing style changes, in-house training has become a challenge. As part of increasing their capacity, BioWare has joined the NSI playWRITE competition–a Telefilm-funded collaboration between the National Screen Institute and Zeros 2 Heroes–as a partner who will provide an internship to a winner announced in August 2008.

“Game writing skills are becoming more important in our industry, and like many developers out there, we’ve identified the need for capable full-time staff members dedicated to story development and dialog writing. Many writers are not aware that they can build a career in the games industry. NSI playWRITE shines a spotlight on this opportunity. If the program can infuse new talent into the industry, it’s a success.”

To check out the competition, visit the NSI playWRITE web site.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Competitions, RESOURCES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.