How (and why) games can adopt the TV writers' room approach to craft their stories | GDC 2022
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Thursday 24th March 2022
At GDC 2022 this week, comics and games writer Antony Johnston gave a talk about how to run (and survive) a writers' room.
In the games industry, Johnston is known for his work on Resident Evil: Village, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and ZombiU, among others.
In his talk, which was part of the event's Game Narrative Summit, Johnston made a case for running games' writing teams the same way TV showrunners lead writers' rooms.
"In TV, the writers' room is both a physical space and a methodology," he explained. "The room is populated by a number of writers with different skill levels and experience. One of those writers, sometimes two, is the showrunner. Normally, the showrunner also wrote the pilot script and has a vision for how it can become a series. So they assemble a room, communicate their vision to the writers who brainstorm ideas for that series, condense those ideas into stories that can become a season of TV, and then write, revise and polish the scripts for episodes.
"The benefits can be enormous, in particular the sense of teamwork and camaraderie it builds"
"What's important is that almost all of that is done collectively, in collaboration as a room. And that is one of the big ideological points of this method. So why has TV worked this way for decades, and now even movies are starting to do it as well? Because it works. Whether it's for a whole season of TV or just a few weeks, the writers' room is valuable. Now, that's worth noting because it's one of the ways games can take this idea and make it our own."
The difference between a traditional writing team and a writers' room is that the latter has a "flatter structure and less rigidly defined roles," he
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
