![]() Indie devs interested in making a concept for a game usually base their projects around seeing how much they can do with a single mechanic, and that’s actually how we wrote We Know The Devil: as the smallest implementation of a simple mechanic. The visual novel, as a genre, has a lot of conventions (like being massively overwritten) but really the main thing is just that the writing is structured around a choices, which you can think of as the game mechanics if you’re into that sort of thing. The five act play, the action movie script, the detective novel, contemporary lit these categories exist as categories because they have a structure, and the exceptions to existing structures are structured around their opposition (and eventually become their own genres). What is radical about this claim for design is what it implies about how we treat writing as part of the design process, which is probably a bigger barrier to good writing in games than a lack of good writers (see: the treatment of narrative paramedics and writers who will hopefully do something). Linear prose is made to look seamless but it has structure and design, and so it’s possible that my claims about writing for games-that writing is design and vice versa-might be more surprising a claim about prose than games. ![]()
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December 2022
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