A Video Game Writer's Toolkit

12 Jul, 2026

Video game writing, as a field, is very hard to pin down. Games are multimedia, and different games can have wildly different narrative presentations. The output of a writer working on a visual novel is going to look very different from the output of a writer working on a AAA action-adventure game.

As such, it's tempting to say that there is in fact no such thing as video game writing; that these are really distinct and unrelated skillsets, perhaps even more similar to other forms of fiction writing than they are to one another.

I don't actually think this is the case. It is undoubtedly a broader and more diverse field than, say, writing screenplays for commercial feature films; few if any writers can really take any writing role anywhere in video games and do great things with it. But this also isn't particularly special; novelists have preferred genres, television writers tend to stick around in certain industry segments. Experience is always constrained relative to the breadth of the medium.

In reality, video game writing at every scale and in every type of game is subject to a diverse but heavily overlapping set of constraints and practices. I do think there really is such a thing as video game writing, as a distinct body of knowledge. This is an incomplete breakdown of it, but you can group a lot of the required skill under five rubrics:

• Writing in iteration;
• Writing to a target;
• Writing the boundaries;
• Writing for others;
• Writing to the medium;

The defining feature of video game writing is that it is a process that happens concurrently, and iterates alongside, other disciplines. This is very unusual; every other narrative medium treats writing as a front-loaded, distinct step. By the time a movie starts shooting, the script should be finished; rewrites or incompleteness at this stage are regarded as a failure mode.

By contrast, video game stories generally evolve in parallel to the game's other aspects, informing them and being informed by them. Even in the purest case of a writer working on a piece of interactive fiction on their own, the writing process invariably exists alongside the process of narrative design, although the boundaries between the two may be unclear. In some cases—though this is not a good approach by any means—writers are brought on towards the end of a project, rather than at the start.

Thus the video game writer is by nature a very political animal, whose job involves not only writing story but advocating for it and adapting it to changing circumstances as the project evolves. Often the role of producers and team leads in video game studios is to shield their teams from having to throw out work because of iteration; narrative really is no different. Navigating the difficult task of producing good work under these conditions means that video game writers need whole-process awareness and honed understanding of where to flex, where to be firm, and where to leave options open.

Probably the closest comparison is to working in serial television—in which the loop of production allows writers to react, respond, and riff on both audience reactions and the actual episodes as they are shot. Or to processes sometimes found in theater, where a playwright may iterate collaboratively with performers to construct a play.

But in video games, iteration happens across different disciplines in many directions, and writing has to respond to a dizzying array of demands on its shape and content. Writing may be required to conform to a structure designed independently of the plot—and that may change, as levels or sequences may be moved or cut for reasons other than story. It may have to adapt to or respect creative contributions from other departments; artists will make decisions about what characters look like, for example, so the writing may have to adjust to be consonant with these decisions. UI and UX considerations may constrain how writing is presented and especially its length.

So, if the first key skill of video game writers is writing in iteration, the second key skill is writing to a target. A common, blunt example is character limits; video games are rife with them. Good video game writers can squeeze or stretch a line, make competent decisions about what information must be kept and what can be elided, know how to smartly use the flexibilities of language to adjust. But there are many other kinds of targets. A game or an individual character may have an established voice that needs to be maintained, for example. In many cases, the reality of video game production requires writers to know how to write to a quality bar—how to understand that the current draft is good enough and should ship so they can move on to the next thing.

When those pre-existing targets are absent, writers—in larger teams, often writing leads, senior writers, or narrative directors—are often tasked with defining them. This is another key part of the toolkit: writing the boundaries. Creative direction often has a general idea of what they're aiming for—"horror," "anime-inspired", "cozy and comforting", etcetera. But just like artists have to translate those general ideas into specific visual constructs like color palette and shape language, writers have to distill this kind of direction down to specifics.

What do people sound like in this story? What kinds of things happen to them? What kinds of actions and attitudes are possible? How are things described? The boundary is what separates what is in and what is out of a certain narrative space. Sometimes this is about blunt, clear lines: if you're making a soft and cute game aimed at young children, you are pretty limited in how you can depict violence. But often it's about having clarity about tonal and thematic colors you're painting with. If you have a mandate to be funny, there's still a large gap between the sense of humor in something like Skin Deep and the sense of humor in something like Fallen London.

Often, it's not enough to develop a clear idea of what you're aiming for; you also have to properly convey it to other writers and enable them to see the same boundaries. The joint between all those other skills—writing in iteration, writing to a target, writing the boundaries—is writing for others, or simply communication.

Communication to other writers, to other departments, sometimes to other teams entirely.¹ Video game writing often encompasses producing documents meant to convey story goals, tone, or themes to others. It also may involve producing intermediary documents like art briefs or cutscene scripts; writing that won't appear in the game, but which is an input to some other process to make something that will. Like a screenwriter, you are often writing both for the audience (dialogue lines that will be in the game) and for collaborators (voice performance, localization notes) working downstream from you.

Again, video game writing at a high level requires deep process understanding of how games are made end to end. This process knowledge is also central in the last skill that I am going to talk about here, which is writing to the medium. Games, again, are multimedia. They not only contain text, audio, and visual elements but a huge space of different possible presentations of all those things.

Writing for voice over, for example, requires understanding at least the basics of vocal performance and how a voice performer is going to approach lines. Just because you can type something doesn't mean an actor can say it, or that it's going to be intelligible to a player listening through all of the other audio in the game.

But even beyond that, different forms of voiced dialogue have to be written for with different considerations. Combat barks are not the same thing as branching conversation with an NPC, which is not the same thing as a fully animated cutscene. Thinking critically from first principles about how writing is going to function in its final context is a required skill; you often need to be able to envision how it's going to present to players before the actual UI or code that presents it is in place!

And an individual game can pose fairly unique writing conditions. In many games, you're trying to keep individual chunks of text as small and digestible as possible. But when I worked on Fallen London, the norm was that players would be presented with a paragraph of text at a time but longer passages were a reward for getting to a story milestone!

A video game writer, then, has to know how to devise the specific logic of how to write for a given format; and then has to be able to code-switch between different formats as production wears on, because most games present their narrative in more than one way. Even Fallen London, primarily a text game driven by flowing prose, includes multiple other types of writing, like item descriptions and progress messages. Those are all vehicles for story, but they also require a different touch from how the main prose is written.

If all of this sounds daunting, that's because it is, even under ideal conditions—and conditions are usually far from ideal. The most capable video game writers I have known tended to combine an almost uncanny stylistic flexibility with irreducible emotional fortitude. You don't have to be like that; I certainly am no bastion of mental resilience and I do fine.

But experience tells me that it's a common failure mode, especially for those who got their start writing in a different medium, to fail to appreciate the breadth of required skills or responsibilities that a typical writer on a video game ends up taking on. This may come in the form of a narrow relationship to the process (ie, failure to write in iteration) or a narrow relationship to format or presentation (failure to write to the medium). Growing as a video game writer, like all writing, requires being able to sit with and deeply interrogate what you're writing and why you're writing it the way you are. But it also requires being unusually attuned to what happens to your writing after you hand it off.

#narrative design #on writing #video games