Been having a lot of thoughts lately about how the narrative work you end up doing in professional gamedev is very different from the stuff you’re encouraged to do during the time period a lot of people spend making non-commercial games before getting a job

Noncommercial narrative games are all about personal expression. However in most of my jobs, I’m asked to copy someone else’s house style. This is something I learned to do not by making games, but by writing shitty parody newspaper and magazine articles for a college humor mag

For games, I thought my work had to be SUPER unique. I learned to write parody prose, but not how to *copy other people’s narrative design,* which is crucial for gamedev work. I image the same is true for folks who learned house style through writing prose fan fiction

Many game writing tests ask you to write content inside a preexisting narrative system that achieves very particular player experiences. Meanwhile, out in noncommercial indie land in 09-12, I was absorbing the message that copying someone else’s narrative design was BAD

Honestly I should have been out there making twine games that copied mass effect’s choice styles exactly, or Telltale’s house style, or resource systems pulled directly from strategy games I liked. But instead I was trying to invent a whole new type of choice experience???

I should have made at least *some* extremely deliberate and obvious “fan fiction” of other people’s narrative design to prove that I could do it, but instead I thought I had to make stuff that was more like the highly unique commercial indie games I admired on steam

Ancient story: ME3 came out my senior year of college. I didn’t like the ending. I was in a coed nerd frat and a lot of us were playing the game, so I spent a weekend writing my own story pitch for a new mass effect ending and email-blasted it out to the frat.

1 yr later I had a job writing highly conventional quest briefs for a game with a creative direction I did not control. I learned way more stuff relevant to my job in that “what the choices at the end of ME3 shoulda been” doc than I did making parser experiments that year

I spent 6-7 years hung up on the idea that I had to make completely new shit to prove myself. I woulda probably learned more, and faster, if I had just stolen all sorts of crap from stuff I liked and put it on the internet. Would have improved my personal work too

If you are curious, my ME3 idea was that earth should have been the crucible and that the player should have had to choose between blowing up the earth to save the galaxy, or dooming the the galaxy (and the earth) forever by preserving it. Brutal stuff lmao

And for context, I don’t think everyone’s goal should be to aim for careers at gigantic studios where all you do is match house style. But even my personal noncommercial work would have been better if I better understood what I was trying to NOT be, haha

It’s normal to find the idea of matching house style at huge companies exhausting. But this kind of style-matching work was necessary on WTWTLW too. The skill is not limited to AAA work and copying popular stuff would have still been a good for me if I ended up primarily in indie