Hey, somebody’s got to keep the camera in the right place, right?

I am not raising this point to insult anyone, and I don’t even think any of the award winners would dispute the fact!

By requiring a game to be submitted for consideration, anyone who submits has a shot, whether it’s a high-profile game like Tomb Raider or an independent game like Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. It helps to level the playing field by putting games that people might not be familiar with in front of the judges.

Requiring submission for consideration isn’t limited to the WGA…it’s true of pretty much every entertainment industry award. In our industry, for example, awards like the IDGA Interactive Achievement Award (which charges $1000 per title submitted) and the Game Audio Network Guild award (which doesn’t charge, but requires the nominator–but not the nominee–to be a member) require games to be submitted–they don’t consider every game.

On a side note, would you say that the IGDA puts money before quality by requiring submitters to pony up a grand in order to be considered? From my point of view, it certainly seems more exclusionary than a $75 WGA membership fee…especially for independent/small developers.

As for “making rules to exclude…”, some kind of standardization of crediting in games is something that the game industry has been striving for. What’s so wrong about requiring someone to be credited as a “writer” in order to win an award for “writing?”

One final point–the assertion that the WGA awards are “pretend awards” and “don’t put quality first” is not only inaccurate, it is also rather insulting to the writers who have won and been nominated for the award. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the award process, but it belittles and denegrates fellow game developers when it is implied that their work is sub-standard just because they weren’t up against some of the more popular games out there.

I guess I understand why the WGA would be so down on Valve’s crediting practices, though (which I understand come from Microsoft). We “know” that Marc Laidlaw and Chet Faliszek are Valve’s writers on Half-Life and Portal, respectively, but if they leave and go to another company, they don’t have any record that they worked on Portal in the specific capacity the company is interested in. The question that raises is, well, part of the story came from design requirements, and the character of GLaDOS was invented because of positive responses to early playtesting. The rest of the team had a hand in the scenario design, so to credit Chet alone because he wrote the dialogue sells the rest of the team short. Valve’s crediting practices come from software development, where people might well have written just the network code but everyone’s credited equally because it’s easier to do that when the team’s working together and trading ideas. That field seems to muddle along just fine. (Valve’s website actually does credit their entire team in the field they work in).

Hypertext seems promising as a written form for a game script. Descriptions and action sequences important to the plot can be rendered as stage directions, as they are in movies. A hyperlink to another part of the document can easily stand in for “the player makes a decision”, so the decision points can be preserved in the script and dialogue that is punctuated by the player exploring, as in Portal, can be rendered as a series of jumps instead of having to continually state “the player explores”.

No, they weren’t — this was what prompted all this (the initial article and the response here). And it’s why coverage of the award looks like this (quoting joystiq):
“As much as we enjoyed Dead Head Fred (it even made one of our Best of the Rest ’07 lists), there’s still that part of us that says it wasn’t a fair fight. In a year that included some of the best video game writing we can think of, the fact that the WGA’s nominees didn’t include titles like Mass Effect, BioShock, or Portal leaves us feeling … well, uneasy.”

“if a game isn’t submitted for consideration, it cannot be expected to win”

Sure it can, just consider all games in the first place. Problem solved! (ha ha)

“I’m not quite sure I understand why there’s so much opposition to the WGA awards.”

Overall the process — broken judging process, major omissions in the included games, designing the rules to exclude Valve — is fairly absurd. I’m not sure why there’s so much acceptance of the WGA awards, really. (Though I’m happy it got Keith some good PR!)

I’m not quite sure I understand why there’s so much opposition to the WGA awards. I think it’s great to have good game writing recognized. If it’s the qualification of the judges that is a sticking point, as Micah said the judges have video game experience. I was one of the judges this year. In addition to being a writer, I’m also a game developer who has been in the business for 17 years and I play a TON of games.

This year’s entries were a good representation of the games of the past year. And, as was previously mentioned, if a game isn’t submitted for consideration, it cannot be expected to win. It’s a simple process, and if you don’t want to remain in the caucus after the first year, you can simply not renew your membership.

I think that the solution here is for more developers to get involved in the process. Trust me, folks…it’s painless and not at all slimy. Just because the game industry didn’t initiate this doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit us.

I have some question:

“our judges are GAME WRITERS” who?.

Sorry but game writers DON’T EXIST, just like @Zaphos say, usually there are script, other times there aren’t any dedicated for such task, in fact even for a big project, is pointless to left a specific person to write some text script.

And now, i want to be harsh:

*Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3.
*Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
*Tomb Raider: Underworld.

I must say one word :DOH!. I played those game and (in fact im still like to play command and conquest) but still i must say that they haven’t a real write you must value.

Awards credibility :zero!.

WGA just don’t do it again, game business is out of your scope, you screw it big time and i don’t think any game developer (indie or big publisher) will give any crap about such award.

Writing a script for a computer is quite different than writing a script for a human — this sort of naive “a script is a script” equivalence just won’t do. It’s also clearly the case that sometimes writers do write complete games.

“I’m sorry that Portal didn’t list a writer last year.”

I’m pretty sure they did … just didn’t put ‘writer’ next to the names. That’s not a respect issue, just a different culture.

I’m sorry you think our award is “slimy” because you think it’s first and foremost a membership recruitment tool. It’s truly not… I know I said our award was first and foremost to introduce writers to the WGA, but when I wrote that, I was admitting to the benefits to the WGA of having an award, not thinking of our purpose for giving out the award in the first place. The purpose of giving an award is to award the best writers in the field of videogame writing, whereas the first benefit to the WGA of that award is introducing the submitting writers to the WGA and our benefits. I’m sorry I misspoke and I’m glad Tim corrected me.

Once we got this award approved, we set out to create the fairest awards possible. We have gone way out of our way to make it possible for non-members to submit for our award (including permitting work not performed under a WGA contract to be submitted, and allowing non-members to join upon submission). I hear your concerns that games where people don’t submit might be better than ones which did submit, but frankly, we’re giving out an award for BEST WRITING, not for best game. Dislike it as much as you may, believe that games are somehow inherently different that all other writing as you may, the fact is that writers write SCRIPTS. All of them, whether it be a list of barks in Excel, or a multi-chain branching dialog tree in Bioware’s proprietary engine, it’s all typed into a computer and therefore, those computers can be forced to disgorge it in the form of a script. Converting some key story/narrative from a game into a linear script for consideration for our award is quite simply the reverse of the process by which most writers submit their work to get paid: Writer don’t hand in completed, finalized, recorded and programmed games, they turn in scripts. So far, it hasn’t been too difficult for most people to submit their work in a readable format.

Because our award is for Best Writing, I ask you how are we to judge this Best Writing without a script? Should we expect three rounds of judges to own 3 game consoles, 2 handhelds, a mac, a windows pc, and an iPhone? Should the WGA go out and purchase 6 copies of every single game that comes out each year for our judges? Should the WGA expect our judges to play a game like Fallout 3 from start to finish? Who has the time for such a labor of Hercules simply to judge the writing in the game? Especially since first round judges would have to do this for up to SIX games!

Additionally, such “play all the games to get the story” requirements would eliminate any judge without the requisite thumb-twitch skill necessary to get all the way to the end, of, say, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. So if a particular judge failed out midway through that game because she can’t overcome Darth Maul’s lightsaber skills, then how likely is she to judge that to be the best script? SHE JUST MISSED HALF OF IT. When we’re judging scripts as scripts, we don’t have these worries. Writers submit their scripts, and we read them. The only games not being considered by us for this award are those games which won’t submit a script for whatever reason, and any company not willing to submit a script can’t really complain that they’re not being considered for our award. The reasons you see some companies (and games) not submitting are multiple, but as time passes, we’ll see those reason begin to disappear and hopefully all games will eventually be submitted… but we have to start somewhere. I’m sorry Dan Hauser wouldn’t return our calls this year when we invited him to submit for GTA IV. I’m sorry EA wouldn’t allow their writers to submit scripts. I’m sorry that Portal didn’t list a writer last year. I’m sorry those games weren’t considered, but we’re not changing the rules… because if we hold our ground, then I’m sure by the 5th year of this award, we’ll be getting every game out there submitted as more and more companies discover that our award isn’t a union sneak attack. 🙂

As for your complaint that submitting a script for this award costs $75 and mandates membership, well, if a professional game writer (or worse a team of 4-10 writers) can’t find $75 to submit for an award, I frankly wonder how they’re paying their rent. Are they writing games for free? I mean, most film script contests have a similar submission fee, and there’s no chance of getting an internationally recognized award for writing at the end of the process. Furthermore, the free DVDs our members get when Awards Season rolls around more than compensates for that whopping $75. I think I got 28 free films this year on DVD & Blu-Ray, most of them weeks before the films opened in theaters. I don’t know many members, Associate or not, who complain about getting free copies of each year’s best films, and that’s just one (really cool and easily cost-estimated) perk of being an Associate member of our Guild. There are others, Jon… join us and see!

This brings up my last point: our judges are GAME WRITERS. No one is better qualified to judge the writing in games, in my opinion. Even though playing the various games is not part of judging, many of us have played some or even all of the final nominated games simply because we’re gamers, or because we’re deliberately playing all big releases in order to stay current on the state of the art in our field. As a game writer, I read game scripts all the time, and I write them as well, in any number of different formats. Judging how well-written a series of random barks might be is actually quite easy if I simply know the context… and since when a writer turns in an Excel spreadsheet of 100 “Funny Things for Hero To Quip As He Shoots Random Terrorists” it usually has a title on it, it’s generally not that difficult for me to figure out what’s going on when I read lines like “Say hello to your 72 virgins!” 🙂

Please don’t judge our contest too harshly simply because it’s attached to our union. Our first intent is to reward great writing, and I think that two years in, we’re doing a pretty good job of it… and we’re getting bigger every year. That said, I’m NEVER giving an award for best game writing to a developer who won’t respect their writer enough to credit her. NEVER. I don’t care if that game is the Bladerunner times Citizen Kane to the Casablanca power of videogame writing. 🙂

(like Tim, my screed = my own opinions, not those of the WGA, etc.)