"For me, writing is like gold," says David Perry, president of Atari's Shiny Entertainment studio. "It saddens me a lot that many video game companies don't hire triple-A writers and that they use their game designers instead. That's why, when real writers look at video game stories, they kind of roll their eyes. But that's something that I see changing, I really do."

(There's a certain degree of irony in that quoted excerpt, but I'll leave you to figure out just what it is.) While games frequently can achieve cinematic atmosphere and scope to great effects, more frequently the collision of Hollywood and gaming happens to gaming's detriment. It is unnecessary to bring in external writing talent on a contract basis just to inject good dialogue and characters into games. If a game is not designed to tell a deep story or develop characters in a meaningful way, no film or television writer is going to change that simply by writing better lines of dialogue. Furthermore, the people playing the game in all likelihood are not going to notice any difference, or care. If is a game's design does, however, ride on those elements, it is far more beneficial for the development studio to make use of an internal writer who knows not only the craft of games but the art of creative writing. The most on-target opinion presented in the article, unsurprisingly, comes from within the game industry itself:

A great example of a respected gamewriter who honed his talents in the industry is Marc Laidlaw, the winner of the 2005 Game Developers Choice Award for best writer for his work on Valve Software's much-praised "Half-Life 2." Laidlaw, who's been a gamewriter for over 12 years--almost nine of them at Valve--says that much of his day is spent brainstorming with other departments--with artists, with level designers, with programmers--developing the backstory for the worlds within the game, for the levels that will be built, for the events that will be played out, giving them an internal consistency.

Laidlaw makes an important point in regards to game writing: while Half-Life 2 does not have much conventional narrative, the cohesion and underpinnings of the world are very directed and crucial. These are precisely the elements that are best understood by those from within the actual game industry, who have development experience and who know how games are made. Now, I am the first to admit that people with that knowledge and with true writing talent are few and far between. However, such roles within studios are growing. One thing that needs to happen is that game writing appearing as a viable path to choose as a writer; rather than aspiring to be a Hollywood screenwriter, a young writer might aspire to be a game writer if video games had a bigger impact on his life than film.

These days, the video game industry in its quest to become Little Hollywood seems to be content with sloppy seconds from Hollywood--hiring Hollywood writers, giving ill-defined "design" deals to Hollywood directors, seeking out Hollywood composers, making a crappy game for every Hollywood film (okay, so that last bit has been going on for a while now). While the games industry obviously has its fair share of talented "exclusive" designers, writers, composers, and so on, their Hollywood counterparts seem continually placed on a pedestal despite having to cater to entirely different forms of expression. When games try this hard to be movies, I just can't shake the feeling that it's perhaps a bit unknowingly pathetic.