Senior Staff Writer Christopher "Pwyff" Tom got the chance to talk with Tom Abernathy about video game writing and the upcoming Game Narrative Summit being hosted at this year's GDC Online.

ZAM: Even with advancements being made in the game writing industry, do you feel there is a general lack of appreciation for the work of video game writers and narrative designers? Your average MMORPG player, for example, has no idea why he or she is setting these huts on fire, even though a writer might have spent countless days making sure they got that dialogue just right.

Tom: Sometimes I think audiences appreciate what writers and narrative designers contribute to games more than the industry does. I'll start by saying that you can obviously have a game with no real narrative behind it, and there are definitely gamers out there who don't care about story in their games. That's fine!

But I also think that the further away you get from core gamers, the more you find people who appreciate and look for gratifying narrative experiences out of the games they're playing. That's why you see people being so rabidly supportive of BioShock or Portal, where the narrative is so strong that it's integrally part of the game experience and it enriches everything. I think that the people who make games are mostly core gamers (although I'm trying not to paint them all with the same brush!), so sometimes I do feel that we are less appreciated by our own industry than we are by our audiences.

ZAM: At ZAM, we're mostly focused on online games in general and MMORPGs in specific. One game writer I spoke to noted that creating a working narrative for an MMORPG is difficult, because players want to be at the center of their universe, and when you make that a common experience for hundreds of thousands of other players, the narrative falls apart. Do you think there is room for a good narrative that utilizes the MMORPG genre?

Tom: I think that the only roadblock is the willingness of companies to employ this kind of narrative. One of the most fundamental issues we encounter as game writers is that we don't - and shouldn't! - have complete control over the flow of events in the game. The user's story is the most important thing. Thus, we always have to consider how to add something of a narrative structure and fiction that feels emotionally satisfying, while still letting the player feel that they've made a choice to have these events happen to them. This is obviously difficult with an online world of thousands of people, but it's possible.

Personally speaking, I believe there is a tremendous opportunity in the online and social gaming space for someone to really commit to a narrative rich experience. I look at a lot of other online MMORPGs we all know the names of, and I don't want to take anything away from what they've achieved, but to a significant extent, there's a sameness to many of these games, a reskinning of those same basic game and narrative mechanics. I look at the online space, and I think it would be perfect for experiences that really feature narrative as an integral part of the game.

I think part of the resistance to experiment with narratives in online gaming is that it's not too easy to demonstrate on a spreadsheet how much it'll add to the bottom line. I also think that people aren't sure how to take a narrative and how they can break it into bite sized chunks to make it work. Here I'm thinking specifically of Facebook games and the like, but I always think of radio segments, or how Dickens used to write his novels in chapters in magazines each month. If you think about it, history shows that there is a place for narrative that has been broken down into smaller pieces and can be delivered in that serialized way. I think that opportunity is there, but it needs someone willing to go through to achieve something new, and it's waiting for someone who has the guts to do it.

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