What aspect of the job would be surprising to people looking in from the outside?
People think that mostly, narrative designer and writers are easy and fun. Seeing game writers this glamourous opportunity. For example, I am going to in charge of the content, the project vision, that is really beautiful. It is really very rewarding experience, and I can say that because I’ve done that and I do that. And I wouldn’t change it, and I love what I do. But be mindful of the struggles you will go through. It’s not easy to manage a team, it’s not even easy clearly communicate your vision. It takes a lot of work, a lot of rewriting it, editing to make sure that you are really nailing down what you want to make sure people understand your story.
From a creative perspective, I think that it does take a lot of work to flash out the core of your experience and make sure that you’re working with the team. But working in a team means being effectively communicating the vision and also hear back from the team and be willing to accept feedback. So, you are willing to accept feedback, and that means you are willing to even improve your content. And set aside any particular piece you could have from the ego perspective. If you’re willing to make this a collaborate experience, I think that will have a lot of gains.
There is this famous Portuguese writer called Jose Saramago. He has a quote says “Everyone is writer, but some write some don’t”, which means reflectively everyone think it’s going to be easy, thinking this is going to be easy to write and everyone presents themselves as content creators. But effectively, when you create content, and you put it out there, that’s the proof that you are actually making it happen. So, you are not a writer until you write. And when you write, you understand that it really makes a huge different trying to articulate that all of the narrative elements that you in charge of handling.
From a technical perspective, what I think people don’t certainly expect writing for a video game, for example, involves a lot more creating content on the spreadsheets than most people would think. So, I worked on several games, and I can’t remember a project where I didn’t have to create at least one spreadsheet. And that spreadsheet could be to organise items, so you could have this spreadsheet with just about the picture of the item, the description of the item, a technical description, a flavourful description etc. It could be a spreadsheet in which I’m actually organising the story, the type of scripts like Sword legacy as I mentioned before, where has about 70 scripts. These include scripts for each level, scripts for each cutscene, and scripts for subsections in the game. And because of that, you need to find a way to properly organise that. So proper organisation is a must when it comes to managing a lot of content, and that is also the part of the narrative designer job that the content that is accessible to the whole team, but that also make sense.
What advice would you give to somebody who’s thinking about becoming a Game Writer for fresh graduates of juniors like me?
I think anyone has given the drive, given the desire to train your skill and to be a confident professional, anyone can become a narrative designer. Like most professions, it takes training and commitment. However, I think though that in life, we should always have the opportunity to experiment, to test things out because sometimes we’re pushed into a path where we need to make a very important conversation. We need to commit to a specific career path, when we’re still trying to figure out what’s going on, like what are the possible career path. So, I always encourage people to go to game jams. And I think game jams are amazing opportunities to test waters. Game jams are great opportunities for you to try making sound effect and music for a game in case you don’t have a composer. It’s great opportunities to you to make some art, for you to write some content, a game articulate that the content directed team, you can do so many things at game jams because it is above all about learning and sharing the experience with the community. And you can also try things that you might not like, and that’s great because if you try something that you don’t like that could be writing or that could be a game designer. Let say you’re not that, in fact, that is an interesting case, that relates to my experience. I went to law school, and I can confidently say that I don’t want to be a lawyer, but I don’t regret not going down the lawyer path. Nothing against it, but I can easily tell the more study, and I did graduate at law school. After I graduated, as I mentioned before I started studying and researching the connections between law, digital media and society, culture and arts. So, at that time, I am already very sure that I didn’t want to go to the lawyer path, and that’s a good thing. I mean we experiment lots of things in life, career paths, different skills and knowledge, and we’re able to understand which one caters to us more than others. So, in game jams, you get the opportunity to try something that you might not like, and if you don’t like, that a good thing because it helps you narrow down the possibilities of what you do like or what you excel at. So, and actually I think that excelling at something is a consequence of liking that because you need to be motivated and you need to be engaged on whatever you are working on if you’re willing to put a lot of energy and effort into it. So, if you are motivated, you are willing to train and horn your skills. So, I think game jams are great starts and then of course if you’re interested in narrative design as well, then I will also say going after your storytelling in general. That’s what I did.
When I started working in games, aside from game jams, I actually started studying a lot of screenwriting materials. So, I started understanding storytelling through screenwriting. But then I slowly started connecting myself on other fields like literature, theatre, video games. Can I work as a game designer? Yes, I do understand and perform the role of a game designer. Still, my profession is on story-driven, so I will always try to fit the mechanic of an experience serving the purpose in the message that wants to be communicated or the emotions. So that’s why I would rather introduce myself a narrative designer, rather than a game designer because I am more on an emotional content creator, rather than assistant creator.
Nicole’s Blog 