In my dark and distant past I was once a games reviewer. It was all so easy then. It always is, being on the outside, looking in. Criticism is easy, putting your money (or in my case your potential income) where your mouth is, is a much bumpier ride.

Stories are almost always the last consideration in a developer’s mind, and the first thing to get chewed up and spat out come a game’s evitable ‘adjustments’ phase. Funny really, since we humans are natural story tellers. We look for the stories in everything. We both generate and regurgitate them. Yet in games they’ve never been that important.

Okay, so things are changing. Stories are no longer being penned by the designer that drew the short straw. The idea of employing a professional writer (or in the case of the games industry, something more akin to a narrative paramedic!) is starting to become less of a luxury and more of a necessity.

Yet it saddens me slightly that the games industry seems to be turning towards Hollywood to solve its story problems (and that’s not just because they’re stealing bread from my mouth!). I’ve heard a fair few tales of woe from companies that have employed Hollywood writers, who charged the earth and didn’t understand games or gameplay. Ultimately, this means professional games writers like myself do get work tidying up after them, but it’s a hardly ideal for the industry as a whole.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Hollywood in general, or their writers… occasionally they actually produce good films! But up until now, the relationship between the film industry and the games industry has hardly been golden. Hollywood is like the big kid who hides behind the tree at the end of the road and steals the little kid’s lunch money, and yet the little kid keeps walking the same way to school every day with a ‘please mug me’ sign on his back.

Why do we do it over and over again? I’m far more convinced that the answer lies in actually trying to foster our own talent, for our own special requirements. Because writing for games is a specialised art, and guess what, it actually requires people who know about games!

Bah! That’s probably a bit of the red wine talking there. But it’s a subject I feel passionately about, and for any of you that get Develop magazine, it’s a subject I shall be gnashing about in the next issue. Hell, they don’t pay me, I might as well get my agenda across!

Like I say, things are getting better. Publishers and developers are getting a little bit braver when it comes to stories. But there’s still a long, long way to go. It was certainly enjoyable being a commentator on the battle for better narrative in games, but it’s so much more fun actually fighting in it!