Quote

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

The video game market is huge, and the ability to tell stories, and tell different kinds of stories in the gaming space is quickly evolving and changing for the better.

The kinds of games I'm most interested in are narrative games.

The great thing about games is that it's tremendously collaborative, and it opens you up to this other world of thinking and storytelling and how you construct those stories.

I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology.

Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there's a multitude of different endings.

I would say I'm a storyteller first, but game making is very wrapped up in how I think of story. If I were to have a story idea, and I decided to write a novel with it instead, I'd have to very consciously de-couple it from gamedom - for example, deliberately add in things that could not be represented in a game scene.

Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.

I'd probably play games obsessively if I didn't write, although I admit I don't read novels partly because I don't enjoy it, not just because it's the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I'm a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe.