If anyone has been out of touch with the gaming world since the eighties, they’d probably laugh at the fact that there are actual game screenwriters in this day and age, let along great ones. In fact, some of the biggest writers in the business, like David Goyer (The Dark Knight), have written for games, and the storytelling has gotten much more sophisticated in recent times.
So much so, that the Writers Guild of America is giving awards for best game writing. The nominees this year? Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, God of War: Ascension, The Last of Us, and Lost Planet 3.
As Variety tells us, we’ll know the winner of February 1 when the WGA awards are awarded in Los Angeles and New York. The WGA has a Videogame Writers Caucus, and it’s great to see game writers represented by the guild along with movie and television writers. (This is certainly no new phenomenon, because the WGA has been awarding great game writing for seven years now.) Last year, Jill Murray won the award for Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation.
So it’s great to see that storytelling in gaming has gotten better and more involving, and it should continue to get better and better from here. It may never be on the level of an Academy Award winning drama, but it’s certainly raising the bar for video games even higher, which is always a good thing.
