Tonight's the launch event for The Video Game Writer's Guide to Surviving an Industry that Hates You.
I've gotten a lot of questions about the title, so let's put some answers out there and clear up some misconceptions in the process.
One, I never said the industry hated only writers. I am sure members of many professional disciplines in gamedev can lay a reasonable claim to being hated by the institutional structures of our field. But, I'm not an expert in those, so I'm not going to write about them. I just know about the hate the industry has for writers, and so that's what my book is about. So I never said you weren't hated, my friends, just that I wasn't going to write about it.
Two, I don't think that game developers by and large hate writers. I have worked with thousands of devs over the course of my career, and the overwhelming majority have been great folks, eager to collaborate and learn, excited for what narrative was doing and interested in finding ways we could work together to make the best games possible. What I do believe, however, is that the industry as configured is stacked against writers and writing in a way that makes for worse games, worse writing, a worse professional experience for writers, and just general misery in lots of different ways for folks who do the words thing. One of the core proposals of the book is to call out these ingrained bad practices, expose them for the problems they are, and offer ways to do better in the future. But for the moment, I've seen too many bad schedules, bad feedback processes, bad approval processes, and just plain bad approaches repeated to move from my original position. Now, if by some miracle this book takes off and everyone takes it to heart, I will be absolutely thrilled to write a sequel called The Video Game Writer's Guide to Working in an Industry That Loves You, but I'm going to wait and see how this one goes first.
Three, this book is not a revenge tour and it never has been. I am not interested in making anyone look bad; that would distract from the actual point of the book. Every experience I relate is done in the interest of providing an approach to take forward or a technique a writer can use to produce a more positive result. If I mention things that were sub-optimal, it's in order to say "Let's stop doing this because here's what results from it, and let's maybe do something better". If all I wanted to do was a tell-all, I sure as hell wouldn't be writing it as a textbook.
And four, the word's right there in the title. It's a guide. It's something intended to give direction, for game writers to pick up and read and hopefully find stuff in it that helps them in their day to day going forward. If there are places in the book that look back, it's only in the interest of avoiding those same pitfalls ahead.
So I hope you pick it up, and if you do, I hope you find it enjoyable and amusing. And I hope you read it for what it is, and that's a good thing.