Have You Played… The Writer Will Do Something?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Hell is other people (gathered at a business meeting). Nowhere does that butchered Satre quote become more clear than in this interactive fiction by Matthew Seiji Burns and Tom Bissell. You are the lead writer at a AAA videogame company, working on the imminent ShatterGate: Future Perfect, and it is becoming clear, even before release, that the game is not up to snuff. The Writer Will Do Something [official site] is about the fear and blame that follows.

It’s a comedy, don’t worry. A mix of sharp social observation and collective embarrassment. The people gathered at the meeting either quickly turn on each other, or offer impotent solutions, or make endless unwarranted and infuriating references to How Dark Souls Did It. Imagine if Glen Garry Glen Ross were set in a single room at Activision on the eve of a half-finished blockbuster being released.

It must be horrible to go to meetings. At RPS we sometimes have a meeting within the comfortable ether of Skype and it’s great because nobody can see anyone else’s face or smell one another. As the protagonist of The Writer Will Do Something, you will have no such luxuries.