Brain Dump

If this entry were a book chapter, or an essay, there would be a subtitle: “Duh”.

I don’t pretend that this is anything brilliant.  Of course designing and writing are two different skills.  I mean, some people are really good at writing, but can’t design worth a flip.  That’s fine, not everyone has to design stuff.

I bring it up because, in the land of self-publishing of games (of all sorts), especially under the model most people from the Forge adopt (specifically: one person designs and writes the game text), we often gloss over this fact.  We talk a lot about design.  A whole lot.  And that’s well and good, design is a huge part of games.

However, it strikes me that there’s another extremely important skill, and that’s writing.  It’s possible, probably even common, for someone to design the structures of their game in such a way to foster a specific sort of interaction in the players, but then fail to write in such a way as to express the rules clearly.

But I figure we’re all familiar with poorly written rules.  The sort that are difficult to parse, or ambiguous.  The rules themselves are sound, but they are conveyed poorly.  However, clear rules isn’t the only thing that good writing skills bring to the table.

I’m specifically talking about evoking specific moods and mindsets in your readers which will, hopefully, influence play to tend toward your vision.  I point you at “Moments frozen in the flow of time” (I think that’s what Ben calls it) in Polaris, or the short introductory bit in Dogs in the Vineyard.

These sorts of textual bit shape play in subtle ways, and the in ways that have little (if anything) to do with your skill as a designer of rules and structures for play.  This is a situation in which being a skilled writer makes you better at communicating your vision.  Again, not much surprise that this is the case.

With all that said, there’s a surprising lack of discussion of good writing of games.  There’s tons of discussion of good design, and playtesting, and that sort of thing.  Yet I don’t recall any discussions of how to organize your text to achieve certain ends, or how to effectively evoke certain emotions, or anything of the sort.  We present one another with rules, and discuss how to improve them, but we don’t do the same with text.

To be fair, writing is a big field, and there are plenty of places to get this sort of help.  More people are giving pointers on how to write than on how to design games, so it makes sense to talk more about rules.  Yet I feel we’ve sort of forgotten, at least some of us (read: me), that writing is an important skill, and one we need to talk about and promote in the context of publishing games.

So, in the interest of doing something other than whine: what are some good resources for learning to write 1) Teaching texts, 2) Reference texts, 3) Evocatively.

Thomas

Tags: Applied, Publishing

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 03:44 and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.