NEW TECH STRETCHES IN GAME-WRITING TASKS

When gamers save up to buy a next-generation console -- like the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, or the Wii -- you can be sure they're eagerly anticipating the near-photorealistic graphics, the heart-pounding action, the intense soundtracks … oh, and let's not forget the great dialogue.

Great dialogue?

Okay, literate scripts may not be high up on gamers' wish lists, but game writers will tell you that their talents are more in-demand than ever before. And this year's 2-day Game Writers Conference in Austin , Texas , was jam-packed with video game scribes underscoring that fact. It's the second annual event dedicated to the art and craft of game writing, with such luminaries as Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe talking about writing comedy for games.

As technology allows artists to create characters that appear human-like, writers explain, the best game developers recognize the need for someone to put words in their mouths that make them sound human-like.

In addition, from a business perspective, experienced writers are being asked to provide the "brand assurance" needed when game characters are licensed from movie and TV characters. Someone needs to make certain that, say, the Superman character in the game meets all the requirements of the licensor -- and that person is usually the game writer.

Take Flint Dille, for instance, who was the writer on Electronic Arts' forthcoming "Superman Returns: The Videogame" which is based on Warner Bros.' June 2006 film.

"Licensing had a profound impact on the job I was hired to do," recalls Dille. "DC Comics, which owns the license to the Superman character, wanted to make sure their characters were presented in a faithful way because they'd had too many instances where they hadn't been. At the same time, we needed to expand on the movie and add a lot more villains for Superman to fight; we couldn't just take the 2-1/2-hour story as it was and expect to transform it into a 12-hour-plus game."

Dille recalls working very closely with the filmmakers, "especially [director] Bryan Singer who was great. A lot of really ambitious, innovative ideas were tossed around, which caused some delays in completing the game," he says, "but I think it'll be a far better product for it. And DC was very pleased with the way it turned out. We made sure that our Superman in the game talks just like their Superman."

Dille notes that a great relationship between the writer and the licensor is extremely important in order to avoid "horrifying cost overruns. In effect, the writer becomes the person embodying the intellectual property."

Dille, who is the CEO of Los Angeles-based Bureau of Film and Games, has been in the game-writing business since the early '90s, having worked with Electronic Arts on their James Bond franchise and with Vin Diesel on his Tigon Games' "Chronicles Of Riddick." He is currently doing the video game version of the live-action "Transformers" movie being directed by Michael Bay . According to Dille, the game is being developed by Traveler's Tales and published by Activision.

"In this case, I'm doing not only the non-interactive cinematics but also working on the actual game design, meaning what the characters say and do," says Dille. "More and more, telling stories in a game is about what happens in the game itself, not just in the dialogue and in the cut scenes."

It's also about collaborating with the voice actors in order to heighten the realism of their performances, he adds. "At one time, a voice in a video game might have been spoken by the telephone receptionist at the game developer and, if you wanted an older voice, you might use the designer's father. But when licensing became important and the licensors didn't like the way their characters sounded, all of a sudden the dialogue and the voice talent needed improving."

While, at first, all that writers wanted was for voice actors to read the script as written, things have changed, says Dille. "We started to see actors coming back and playing the same characters over and over again which they got to know real well. Soon they were fixing the lines we wrote and making them far better than what we'd heard in our head at the typewriter. That's what a good voice actor can bring to the party." Debi Mae West is one such voice actor. She's credited with having worked on 22 games over the past nine years. Notably, she originated the role of Meryl Silverburgh in the classic Konami game "Metal Gear Solid" -- she has repeated the part three times already -- and is hoping to play the part again in the upcoming "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots," scheduled for release next year.

"Meryl was simply a wonderful part and I'd love to come back to that if they want me," she says. " 'Metal Gear Solid' was one of the first games that really utilized voice actors in a big way and one in which the gamer really became involved with the characters. The writers actually had me doing some pretty dramatic acting, and I remember tearing up when I watched the game later on."

She gets a kick out of being known for the part and recalls meeting some teenagers in an airport who were going off to Army training. "We started chatting about video games," she recalls, "and I told them that I was, in fact, Meryl from 'Metal Gear Solid.' They flipped!"

While West regularly does voiceovers for other media -- she was also Lucky the Dalmatian in the "101 Dalmatians: The Series," a customer in a Ford commercial and the voice of Joan Rivers in Comedy Central's "Drawn Together" -- she says she especially likes collaborating with video game writers.

"The best ones, the ones who want to get the most out of their actors, will give us as much as possible to work with," she says. "Sometimes, even though your character may only have eight or 10 lines, the writer will create a whole two- to three-page back story for you so you have a better understanding of the person you're creating."

While she recognizes that the gameplay and the technology will always be more important to the gamer than the acting and voiceover, "as the games develop and become more complex, I think we'll see the writers and actors working together more to create even better games."

Indeed, West says her work has already been affected by the technology. When she played the part of the announcer in Sony's "ATV Offroad Fury 3," the developers had her wear a motion-capture suit so that her body-acting and voiceover could be recorded simultaneously.

It made the acting more fluid, much more genuine, and shows you the direction games are headed," she says.

At Edmonton, Canada-based developer BioWare Corp., it is this kind of technology that is putting pressure on game writers to raise the bar on what they do.

"When we did 'Neverwinter Nights' just four years ago, many of the characters were seen from a distance and you really didn't get to see their faces," recounts Mac Walters, a writer at BioWare. "When the character got angry, it was important for him to say, 'I'm angry,' because you couldn't see it on his face. Today, with better graphics technology, a character in a game like 'Mass Effect' walks right up to you and you can see by his stance, by the way his eyes shift, that he's feeling complex emotions. There's no longer a need for exposition like 'I'm angry.' Instead, we have opportunities to move the dialogue along -- really sort of quickly and succinctly -- just as you'd hear in a TV show. It involves new writing skills, which is why we're continually researching and looking at new ways to work with these digital actors."

In "Mass Effect," a next-generation role-playing game for the Xbox 360 scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, Walters and lead writer Mike Laidlaw recall that creating the characters became a team effort. [The first installment of a planned trilogy, the game takes place in the year 2183 and revolves around an ancient prophecy that says that every 50,000 years machines come to this galaxy to harvest all organic life -- and the time of their return is approaching.]

"It's an interesting shift for us not being the ones entirely responsible for the character development," notes Laidlaw. "As the characters have become more photorealistic, more emotive, the writers have become part of an integral team of cinematic designers, sound designers, people working on the facial animation systems, and so on. Otherwise, you'd get this sort of buckshot effect with the animators coming up with a shifty-eye movement to show suspicion, (while we're) writing dialogue that shows something entirely different, like, say, happiness. Communication among all the team members has become imperative because, without it, the whole process would disintegrate."

Walters reports that, as a writer, he's had to become much more aware of what the departments around him are doing and what they're contributing to the game.

"When I write a line of dialogue now, it's not being done in a vacuum," he says. "If you write a line that's a little too chatty, you need to be aware that you're forcing the cinematic designers to go back and re-do the animations after they'd just finished getting all the facial expressions exactly right."

The BioWare writers agree that the next-gen video consoles have enabled them to progress to a much more sophisticated style of writing.

"We are actually moving toward writing like the kind you'll see on TV or in the movies," says Laidlaw. "In fact, we'll often meet and go over, say, an episode of '24' that we like and discuss how they get across some of their great dialogue.

"There's an expectation by the gamer that the writing and the voice acting will be as professional if not better than what they're used to on TV, and so we need to constantly improve, make the dialogue snappier, make it more natural, and use top-notch voice actors to say it," Laidlaw says. "And I think gamers are recognizing that we're doing that and they're impressed by it; you read it on the online forums all the time. The one thing we can't forget is that if a character is going to look realistic, we can't make him sound like we hired someone's cousin Timmy to play the part."