作者：Austin Grossman

大学毕业后我申请了出版业的工作。我想要成为一名文学青年，成为充满激情且富有创造性的知识分子中的一份子。

但是我却未获得这份工作。或者是因为我并未真心向往这样的工作，还或者是因为我觉得它有点空洞。当然我并不是一个非常完美的候选人，即那种带有出色的成绩单以及厚实的写作样本组合的人。所以我最终并未进入出版领域或走上其他能够帮助自己成为一名小说作家的道路。我最终选择了电子游戏。

在Blue Sky Productions，即不久前变成了Looking Glass Studios，这家最具有创造性和挑战性的电子游戏工作室中，你便可以成为其中的一分子。1992年，Looking Glass走在实时3D游戏的前沿。它创造了像《地下创世纪1》和《地下创世纪2》，《System Shock》，《Flight Unlimited》，《史前新纪元》以及《Thief》等游戏。尽管它在2000年5月正式关门了，但其雇员却早已扩散到整个产业中并成为创造了像《Deus Ex》，《吉他英雄》，《半条命2》，Xbox，《羞辱》，《辐射3》等等游戏的团队的核心成员。而我也非常幸运地成为了这些人中的一员。那时候的我与一群最聪明且最具有创造性的设计师们一起工作着——我想应该找不到比他们更有激情且更具有开创性的知识分子了；尽管这看起来并不是我所期待的。

电子游戏见证了我是如何成为一名勤劳的作家。通过冒险游戏和角色扮演游戏，我学会了如何创造情节；我编写了由一个遥远且独立的实体（即玩家）控制的角色。最后我写了小说。我写下了《Soon I Will Be Invincible》和《You》，并且希望写出更多作品。但是在设计领域打滚了10多年，我吸取了一些核心的经验教训，并且将起到永久性的作用。可以说这就像是一所古怪的精修学校，也有自己古怪的经验教训，而我将在此尽可能地分享我所学到的内容。

故事不需要是直接的

就像我们所知道的，互动式地讲述故事意味着学习一个不同的技巧。即利用故事分支或者消失在大量的可能性中。说明和线性叙述通常都是笨拙的，不可能的或者迟钝的。在这里，行动主要是由一个被称为“玩家”的遥远且不受控制的人物所左右，我们需要不断对玩家的情绪和虚妄做出解释，并包含他们对其他成员的愤怒以及杀死对方。

当我第一次编写一款传统结构的角色扮演游戏时，我感受到了对玩家角色发号施令与尝试着让NPC像电影角色那样行动是多么笨拙。所以我决定去掉游戏中的非玩家角色——我设置了《System Shock》的结构，如此玩家便可以探索一个人口几乎灭亡或遭遇突变的太空站。比起翻越菜单对话，玩家可以通过环境提示，日记，广播信息和一个疯狂的人工智能的嘲讽重新改造行动。

你将学会创新。毕竟，玩家正在使用屏幕上的一切内容去形成有关他们正在做什么以及为什么在做这些事的理念。你将学习如何将故事悄悄地整合到游戏中。将其置于满是灰层的角落并分层整合到世界的其它部分中，嵌入战斗机制，关卡几何结构以及音频线索中，或者留给玩家半个线索去填充。直至今天，我不能再直接地传达一个故事——《Soon I Will Be Invincible》和《You》的镜头是在过去与现在之间穿梭着。

没有人真的想要阅读你的文字

想象你的文字是出现于电子游戏中。玩家正愉快地玩着游戏，突然屏幕冻结了，你所写的密密麻麻的段落突然出现在闪烁的屏幕上。玩家可以按压一个按键让这些文本消失并重新开始游戏—-如此你的文字将被华丽的计算机图像和活跃的行动所取代。玩家可以随时按压这一按键，他们没有理由不这么做。除非他们真的非常非常喜欢你的文字。

是的，如果你能够承受住玩家的抱怨，你大可以让他们不能够跳过你的文本内容。当你在玩游戏时，你可以看看自己是否会讨厌自己写的东西。没有什么比听着自己写的有关玩家角色的星球的历史，却疯狂地敲打着控制器上的每个按键希望画外音演员能够加快速度赶紧念完更让人郁闷了吧。

即使是在编写着小说般长度的内容，我也从未失去这样的感受，即手指悬浮在半空中，只为等着点击略过一大段内容。

文字可能突显于某些领域但也有可能不适合其它领域

在电子游戏中，文字通常是传达内容的最糟糕的方法。为什么当你能够说明正确的门时要说“选择左边的第三扇门”，或者当你能够走进它时要让控制器震动？人们总是厌倦阅读，这是抽象且拖拉的，在媒体中，如果使用灯光，声音甚至是碰触，你便能够意识到怎样的工作语言表现得好而哪些又表现得不好，电子游戏便有效地暴露出了这些优势与劣势。

语言有其独特的魔力，特别当你能够有效使用它们时。当玩家在探索一个被废弃的车站时，你发现游戏添加了一些画外音，或让同伴角色去暗示该场所背后的历史，列出了那些永远都不能触及的目的地，提及了某个温暖的夏夜，还有在微风中茉莉花的暗示等等。你可以使用它去召唤遥远的组织，参考过去，并引起所有感官的反应。在电子游戏中，文字必须为了产生效果而竞争着，而这也将推动着你更有效地使用这些内容。

writing（from polygon）

这并不是关于作者

比在其它媒体中更明显的是，你并不是在阐述自己的故事，甚至也不是在讲述玩家角色的故事。你正在为那些可能拿起控制器玩游戏的陌生人创造故事体验。你可以哄骗或诱导他们在叙述道路上前行，你也可以创造所有的情景支持并连接所有的节点，但最终他们会产生怎样的想法并不是取决于你。

通过资深的投资，目的，偏见和计划，他们创造了一件艺术品。他们的故事可能想要收集王国中所有遗失的硬币，粉碎所有易碎的事物，或者只是在游戏宇宙中到达最高的地方。也许这比你能够想到的任何内容更酷。不管怎样，你创造了一个会出现故事并产生作用的世界。

没有人认为你所做的是特别的

很多致力于电子游戏公司的人并未真正崇敬文学这一门古老的艺术。他们关于这方面的认识还只是停留在高中的英文课上。在未得到证明之前，他们只会认为你是个吹牛大王，并且根本不会去尊重你。他们甚至会认为你在这一新媒体中不会有立足之地。你的工作便是去说服他们你正在加强电子游戏的体验，而不是阻碍它的发展。直到你赋予其特殊性，你的文字内容才会变得特别。

甚至有些认为文字内容是重要的人也并未真正尊重你，只因为你是为了电子游戏而写字。与你相比，甚至连那些不在电影院上映的电影的编辑都像是技巧之神。有个朋友同时也同事曾当着我的面说道：“当你完成了这些脚本后，将会有个真正的作家前来检查它们。”那时候我就发誓要让他对自己所说的付出代价。这也成为了激励我不断前进的动力。

你能够战胜这一挑战。你正在从头开始创造一个媒体，与我们同时发现了它，用你的双手创造着故事和语言等作为该媒体重要组成部分的内容。当你第一次看到一个新玩家一直坐在你所创造的过场动画前面，看着他们因为剧情的冲击几乎就要贴到屏幕上时，你便知道自己真正做到了。

你可以写好有关所有事物的内容

你很少能够选择自己的主题—-你只是在编写别人所指定的内容。如果游戏是关于带有知觉的雷根糖之间的战斗，那么你需要做的便是编写Lemon–Lime公爵向Chili–Mango Vizier投降的演说，因为这是游戏所需要的。你发现在此对自己有意义的内容，你创造了这样的演说，你让他们一点一点地对Lemon–Lime的世界感到自豪。你会意识到自己可能是个悲哀的文学青年，但也许在你未意识到之前你就已经是个非常出色的作家了。

你也有自己的发言权

我并不认为为游戏写作比为其它媒体写作奇怪。这是一种全新且让人陌生的方法，但最终所起到的作用却是相同的。你会尝试不同的内容。你会写下草稿并将其丢掉。你讨厌自己，工作，情节，角色以及制作人。没有什么代表着一切。一句短语，一个角色或一个理念拖着你走，而你并不知道为什么。你遵循着它，你编写了100个单词并删除了其中的90个。但不管怎样它都发挥了作用。你找到了它并写下了它。你就是一个作家。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Video Games Taught Me How to Write

By Austin Grossman

When I finished college, I applied for jobs in publishing. I wanted to be a literary young man and be part of a recycled idea of a passionate, groundbreaking creative intelligentsia. I don’t know that I would have admitted it to myself, but it’s true.

But I didn’t get that job in publishing. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it, maybe I sensed it rang a little hollow. Certainly I wasn’t a promising candidate, with an eclectic transcript and an oddball portfolio of writing samples. So I didn’t go into publishing or to an MFA or any of the other, regular paths to becoming a fiction writer. I went into video games.

This was at Blue Sky Productions, which was shortly to become Looking Glass Studios, one of the most creative, challenging, intense video game studios you could ever become a part of. It was 1992 and Looking Glass was at the vanguard of real-time 3D gaming. Among the games it produced were Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, System Shock, Flight Unlimited, Terra Nova and Thief. It closed its doors in May of 2000, but its employees have spread out through the industry to become core members of the teams that produced Deus Ex, Guitar Hero, Half-Life 2, the Xbox, Dishonored, Fallout 3 and many, many others. I was extremely lucky to be a part of it. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was mixing with some of the smartest, most inventive artists anywhere — I don’t think there was a more passionate, groundbreaking creative intelligentsia to be found anywhere; it just didn’t look like what I was expecting.

I wanted to be a literary young man

Video games were how I became a working writer. I learned my plotting through adventure games and role-playing games; I wrote characters that were controlled by a far-distant, independent entity, the player. And eventually, I did write novels. I wrote Soon I Will Be Invincible, and You, and I hope to write more. But the core lessons of a decade in the design pits had been learned, the warping had long since taken permanent effect. It was a weird finishing school and it had its own weird lessons, which I’ll share as best I can.

Stories don’t have to go in a straight line.

As we all know, telling a story interactively means learning a different craft. Stories branch or disappear into a cloud of possibilities. Exposition and linear narrative are often awkward, impossible or killingly dull. The action is dominated by a distant, uncontrollable figure known as The Player whose moods and whims must constantly be accounted for, up to and including rampaging and killing other cast members.

After my first time writing a traditionally structured role-playing game, I felt the terrible awkwardness of bossing around the player character and trying to make NPCs act like movie characters. I decided to do away with in-game non-player characters — I set up the structure of System Shock so that players were exploring a space station whose population had already died or mutated. Instead of paging through menued conversations, they reconstructed the action through environmental cues, diaries, radio messages and the taunts of a mad artificial intelligence.

You learn to be inventive. After all, players are using everything on the screen to form an idea of what they’re doing and why. You learn to sneak story in at the margins. Leave it lying in dusty corners and layered into other parts of the world, embedded into combat mechanics and level geometry and audio cues, or leave half-cues for players to fill in. To this day, I can’t tell a story straight through — Soon I Will Be Invincible and You zoom back and forth from the past and the present.

No one necessarily wants to read your prose.

Imagine your writing is in a video game. The player is happily playing through when suddenly the screen freezes and dense paragraphs of your own precious words appear on the glowing screen. The player has a button which will instantly make your text disappear and the game will resume — your words disappear, replaced by gorgeous computer graphics and fluid kinetic action. They can press it at any time and they have no incentive not to. Not unless they really, really like your writing.

And yes, you can make it impossible to skip past your scrolling text, if you’re comfortable with the player hating you. And when you yourself play your game, see if you’re comfortable with hating your own words, which you will be forced to listen to. Few things are so humbling as listening to your own prose, rambling on about the history of the player character’s home planet, while you — the writer! — mash every button on the controller trying to get it to stop, praying the voice-over actor would just speed it up and get it over with.

Even writing at novel length, I’ve never lost the sense of that hovering thumb, just waiting to click past a deadening, self-indulgent passage.

Words are good at some things and not others

In a video game, words are often the worst way to convey anything. Why say “take the third door on the left” when you can illuminate the correct door, or make the controller shake when you walk near it? Reading is cumbersome, it’s abstract and it’s slow, and in a medium that uses light, sound and even touch, you have to be conscious of what jobs language does well, and what it doesn’t, and video games expose those strengths and weaknesses really well.

And language has its own magic, which becomes more obvious when you’re using it well. When the player is exploring a derelict train station, and you find it adds someting to have a voice-over or companion character to hint gently at the history behind it, list those never-to-be-reached-again destinations, mention the warm summer night air, the hint of jasmine on the breeze. You can use it to summon distant associations, reference the past, bring in all the senses. In video games, words have to compete for their effect, and that sensitizes you, trains you to use it well.

It’s not about the author

Even more obviously than in other media, you’re not telling your own story, or even the player character’s story. You’re creating a story experience for that stranger who’s picked up the controller. You can coax or seduce them along a narrative path, you can create all the affordances and connect all the dots, but ultimately what they’re thinking is not up to you.

They come to a piece of art with their own investments, intentions, prejudices and plans. Their story might be wanting to collect every missing coin in the kingdom, or smash everything breakable, or just reach the highest vertical elevation in the game’s universe. It may well be something cooler than anything you’ll ever come up with. You don’t know, but you make a world in which story can appear and take effect, and hope for the best.

No one thinks what you’re doing is special

A lot of people working at a video game company do not venerate ye ancient art of wordsmitherie. Their indoctrination on that score ended with their last high school English class. Until proven otherwise, they think you’re a fuzzy-thinking bullshit artist, and they do not owe you respect. They may actively, vocally believe you have no place at all in this new medium. It’s your job to convince them that you’re enhancing the experience of playing this video game rather than actively slowing it down and holding it back. Writing isn’t special until you make it special. It’s good to get over it.

Even people who think writing is important don’t respect you, because you’re writing for a video game. The third screenwriter on the worst straight-to-video movie is a living god of the craft compared to you. A friend and co-worker once told me, direct to my face, unblinking: “Once you’re done with these scripts we’ll have a real writer come in and look it over, OK?” I took it, unblinking, and vowed to make him eat those words for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It motivated me then; it still does.

It’s worth it to win that challenge, and you can. You’re building a medium from the ground up, discovering it at the same time as the rest of us, and making story and language a meaningful part of it, with your own hands. The first moment you watch a new player sit all the way through your cutscene, watch them lean in to the screen as the weight of the drama hits them, you know you’ve done it, no faking, no charity, for real.

You can write well about anything

It’s rare that you’re choosing your own subject matter — you’re writing what’s assigned. If the game is about a war among animated sentient jelly beans, today you are writing Duke Lemon-Lime’s speech surrendering to the Chili-Mango Vizier, because that is what the game needs. You find what’s meaningful in it for you, and you muscle that speech in, and you care, and you make them all feel a world of Lemon-Lime pride and tradition breaking, inch by inch, bean by bean. You realize that you may be a sad young literary man, but you don’t have to write about one, and maybe — maybe! — you’re a better writer when you’re not.

You have a voice. It comes. You find it.

Writing is weird. I don’t think writing for games is weirder than other kinds. It’s newer and stranger, but ultimately it works the same way. You try different things. You do drafts and throw them out. You hate yourself, your job, your plot, your characters, your producer. You decide writing doesn’t mean anything. Games don’t mean anything. Nothing means anything. And then, a phrase or a character or idea tugs at you and you don’t know why. You follow it, you write a hundred words and delete ninety of them. But it comes. It works. You find it. You write it. You’re a writer.(source:polygon)