Final Thoughts

An audience, listening to a film score, rarely picks out every musical instrument, chord progression, or key shift. The listener simply feels moved.

Similarly, superb writing employs a vast array of techniques that operate outside the audience's or gamer's awareness. This is why writing techniques are almost impossible to assimilate without study. It's also why most untrained writers whether they're in a game company or not end up doing sub-par work. They can have control of only those techniques within their awareness. They can't, by definition, masterfully control techniques of which they are not aware.

As Chapter 1.4 pointed out, if screenwriters want to contribute heavily to the game experience, they need to learn a tremendous amount about games.

Conversely, if someone on a development team with no writing background wants to do all the writing for a game and to bring emotion into it as well, then that individual will need to buckle down to hone his or her writing skills and learn some of the available techniques.

Just as an alpaca is a sort of hybrid of a camel and a llama, the future of games with characters and stories will require a new kind of game designer/writer hybrid. Hopefully, this book will abet this process of "alpacafication." It's really just a codification of alpacafication information.^[1]

^[1] This discussion of alpacas hardly scratches the surface of what kind of strange entities they are, and it stops woefully short of clarifying the full complexity of their troubling relationship to camels and llamas. Perhaps, most critically, it doesn't begin to address their relationship to Quinn the Eskimo, nor their role in the future hopes and dreams of mankind. However, these weighty issues will be examined in full detail in Chapter 5.3, "Gatherings."