10 things you didn't know about writing for games

Thought I might give you a glimpse into how the sausage gets made, if you don't mind awfully. As you may or may not know, I've done some sporadic moonlighting on the other side of the fence, writing for rather than about games. I don't mention those games or the companies they were for on the site in order to avoid conflicts of interest, and for the same reason I won't specify what games I've worked on in this post either.

What I do want to talk about is how writing for games works behind the scenes - it's entirely different to any other form of writing I've done, rife with complexities and frustrations that are specific to this particular medium. While there remains no excuse for a truly badly-written game, I do now have a deep sympathy for writers on titles I have not been impressed by - the situation is never anything like as simple as a good or a bad story, but rather about whether a tale, style and characterisation can endure a thousand cuts without dying.