Every year the Writers Guild of America awards a special Outstanding Achievement in Video Game Writing award to the team responsible for the most memorable interactive entertainment script. Which of these five titles will walk away a winner on February 19?
Every adventure requires an antagonist, someone or something corrupting the world you’re in. It’s a basic need. Yet why do so many games serve up foes whose evildoing provides more of a chore to be undone than a memorable struggle?
No matter who is brought in to write a story or dialogue, the industry still treats the written word in such a utilitarian way that it has a second-class citizenship among the other art forms comprising a video game.
Why would anyone spend 12 years working on a single game, with no assurances it’ll ever be finished. It’s called “escalation of commitment” – a classic good-money-after-bad bargain, and a psychologist thinks it explains Duke Nukem Forever.
As game designers become more like film directors, the paths they lay out for players becomes increasingly scripted and, frankly, downright restricted. Still the illusion of freedom persists in this genre.
Calling it “the straightest Grand Theft Auto ever,” largely for effect, PopMatters’ G. Christopher Williams says The Ballad of Gay Tony hews to some hetero-driven crime-novel representations of both sexualities, but in the end is about much deeper themes.
That picture above poses an interesting question to Massively’s Seraphina Brennan. Why, she wonders, is the knee-jerk reaction to get bent out of shape about a buxom, indiscreetly clothed woman in a video game, but not a ripped, stripped-to-the-waist man?
