So do you think the Internet provides new possibilities for a wider breadth of
games than is currently available?
Yeah, well I definitely think so in terms of providing an outlet for the more personal or
more experimental kind of games. Other than that, for now, there are certainly nega-
tives about it in terms of bandwidth. With the games I’m doing now, while there are
really interesting and really fun things about them, it’s certainly kind of annoying to be
back in the days where 100K is really big, and in some cases too big. I had gotten away
from that as we got into the CD-ROM days, where the size of things became, in most
cases, completely inconsequential, and now all of a sudden it’s back in spades. But yes,
overall, there are certainly positives and negatives, but overall the positives are very
promising and the things that are negative about it, like there are certain kinds of games
we can’t do because of bandwidth — well, people can still do those games via the nor-
mal, traditional channels.
Do you find writing or playing games more fun?
Playing. Writing games is sometimes a lot of fun, and sometimes a lot of drudgery, and
sometimes it’s really brutally painful, like when your company goes out of business.
But playing games is always fun. Of course, the funnest parts of making games are more
fun than the funnest parts of playing games.
So much writing in games is dreadful. What do you think is important to keep
in mind when writing for a game?
All types of writing are different, and there are plenty of excellent novel writers who
couldn’t write a screenplay or vice versa. And writing for games is at least as different
as those two. Of course, there are exceptions also. It helps to be a game player. You
wouldn’t expect a novelist to succeed as a screenwriter if he hadn’t seen any movies!
So a lot of the writing in games is bad because it’s being written as though it is for
another medium. Of course, some of the writing is bad just because the writers doing it
are untalented. As with game design, programmers and producers often incorrectly
feel that they’re capable of doing the writing.
One thing that makes the writing in games so different is that it often comes in lit-
tle disconnected chunks, one-word or one-sentence responses to various actions by the
player. There is a difficult trade-off between keeping such snippets interesting and
keeping them terse. Also, writing has to be so meticulously crafted for gameplay and
puzzle purposes — give away just enough clues, not too many, don’t mislead — that the
quality of the writing often has to take a backseat. And the non-linear nature of games is
another obstacle to good writing. If you don’t know whether Line A or Line B will come
first, there often has to be a duplication of information, giving the appearance of being
sloppy or overly wordy. And finally, there’s the issue of repetition. In adventure games,
you often see the same piece of writing over and over again, with familiarity breeding
contempt for even very good writing.
196 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky