Ninetoes interviews the man behind some video games you may have played, and discusses his new book, THE VIDEO GAME WRITER’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING AN INDUSTRY THAT HATES YOU.
Welcome, Mr. Dansky. I did a quick bit of research and I have to say, if we were sitting in the same room, I would have to buy you the drink of your choice. Just in the video games alone…wow! Alas, we are not here for me to gush all over you, and I do have some questions. Thank you for your time.
Darren Perdue: How did you get into game writing?
Rich Dansky: I was huge into RPGs and LARPs through college and grad school, and so when Jennifer Hartshorn, whom I had known well and gamed with at Wesleyan, needed some writing done for the Haunts book for Wraith, she was kind enough to reach out and ask me if I wanted to give it a shot. I did, and that seemed to go well, and so I wrote some more Wraith, and then some Changeling, and the next thing I knew I was in Atlanta working directly for White Wolf. I did that for four years, but by the end of it I was feeling a little burned out, like I had said everything I wanted to say in that space at that time. There are only so many times you can write “The Storytelling Chapter” before it gets stale, after all. So when my friend David Weinstein, who was at Red Storm, started poking at me to apply to RSE and try a new challenge there, I eventually succumbed and the rest is history.
DP: What are the responsibilities of the lead writer for any kind of game, be it RPG or Video Games?
RD: That varies so wildly based on the medium, the type and size of game, the studio culture and history, and so much more. The role I’ve kind of settled into these days as a narrative director is slightly more clean-cut, but only slightly, and that involves being the voice of narrative on a team leadership level, making sure all the narrative stuff gets done and meets expectation, training up the members of the narrative team, pitching in directly when there’s a need, and otherwise being Narrative Go-To Person for all things.
Generally, this means a lot of meetings.
DP: Are there any differences between writing for RPG’s and Video Games? If so, what are they?
RD: Video game writing, particularly in the AAA space, is a large team sport. You are a small cog in a very large, very intricate, very expensive machine, and that means you have to always be working in harmony with everyone else or the whole thing crashes down. In TTRPG stuff, if I wanted to change a paragraph of text, even last minute, I could generally bribe the layout artist into letting me sneak the change in as long as it didn’t mess with the overall layout. In a video game, if I want to add a last minute line of dialog, that affects me, the voice actor, the voice director, the recording engineer, the recording studio, the audio engineer who’s going to put the revised dialog into the game, the mission scripter who’s going to place the sound file, the localization experts who are going to be translating it into various languages….the list goes on and on.
Also, TTRPG writing is outwardly directed. It’s all about building the stuff that players and GMs can pick up and run with and build their own stories using that as a base. It’s basically filling the chafing dishes at a giant buffet so the folks on the other end can help themselves to whatever they want in whatever combination they want.
Video game stuff, on the other hand, is focused inward. One of the cardinal sins of video game writing is making the player want to do something the game can’t support them doing. Do that, and the player gets frustrated, and then suddenly they’re playing a different game. You have to carefully marry the narrative fantasy to the gameplay model so that the story and character concepts make the player want to do the things the game lets them do well.
DP: I am a fan of your work on The Division Games, Splinter Cell Games, Far Cry and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Do you have a background in either the military or law enforcement?
RD: Nope. I’ve got two English degrees and a deep and abiding love of doing research. Before starting work on the Clancy games, my interest in military stuff was largely focused on the Civil War – I am the world’s biggest General George Thomas fanboy – but once it became a profession responsibility, I dove in headfirst and found stuff that excited and interested me that I could use as a way in. Not having served myself, I wanted to always show the utmost respect toward the subject matter, and that meant doing everything I could to get stuff right and back up my choices with research.
I do, however, have a Hawaiian shirt collection that would put Jack Carver’s from Far Cry to shame.
DP: When you worked for Red Storm Entertainment, did you have a list of absolute no-no’s from Tom Clancy to follow? If so, can you share what some of them were?
RD: We never had anything like that from Mr. Clancy. What we did have was a code of stuff that we developed and stuck to, and for a while we’d be running everything past Mr. Clancy and his representatives to make sure they were OK with what we were doing. But I can’t think of a single time we got a “No” on any story element.
DP: How difficult was it to get into Tom Clancy’s mind when writing the games associated with his name?
RD: The great thing about working in the Tom Clancy space was that the pillars of the world were so clearly defined. It was really cut and dried what was appropriate for a Clancy game story and what wasn’t. So the walls of the sandbox were in place from the get-go, and then I just had to mess around within that sandbox to come up with something cool. And if there was ever any question, you could just hold an idea up against the basic pillars – always a clear and present danger, always global in scale, always tomorrow and not the day after tomorrow when it came to tech, and so on – and say “Does this match?” It made for a very clean process in that regard.
It’s not to say that I couldn’t get creative and do all sorts of fun stuff ripped from the back pages of newspapers and deep dive geopolitical and military sites, but rather that I had a very clear baseline to measure those ideas against. And if they didn’t fit, they were gone.
DP: Was “The Dollar Flu” in The Division and The Division 2 your idea? If so, just where did that idea come from, because I have to tell you, as a fan of the game, it is absolutely brilliant!
RD: That was the brainchild of Martin Hultberg, who did an excellent job of building that aspect of the world. Martin was great to work with, and he’s now killing it over at SharkMob.
DP: I notice you have several novels to your name. How is it different writing for a video game or role-playing game as opposed to a novel?
RD: There are innumerable differences, but the big one is this: when I’m writing a novel, I control every aspect, from the pacing to who does what when. Writing for a video game, I have to relinquish that control because it’s not my story, it’s the player’s, and at any given moment they can do anything they want. That’s the magic of interactivity, and that’s why it’s often hard for linear media writers to take a swing at games. In fiction, I’m writing the story. In games, I’m putting all the pieces in place that wait there for the player to come along, and only when that happens does the potential I’ve created get translated into that player’s particular gameplay story.
There’s a million other differences, but they’re all honestly minor league compared to that one big one.
DP: Can you tell me one thing you know now that you wish you knew at the very beginning of your career?
RD: That writing is a craft as well as an art. I broke into professional writing with basically zero formal training. The only creative writing class in six years of higher education was one on writing for the stage. And so I had no idea how to do the actual job. All I had was a headful of stories about guys writing for the pulps hammering out 10K words a day, uphill both ways, in the snow, and how they liked it. Foolish me, I thought that was actually the standard, and that we were all Harlan Ellison.
The good news was that in those days I was able to just sit down and hammer words out on demand when inspiration hit, but even then, there were dry spells that should have been a warning. I kept rolling somehow until after I finished The Trilogy of the Second Age, and then the crash hit.
Eventually, I figured out that what I was doing wasn’t actually working, that a 5000 word night followed by a week of burnout was not leaving me ahead and certainly was making it impossible to plan. So I had to completely retrain my writing approach, building a daily ritual that let me be maybe a little less productive on any given day, but much more consistently productive in the long run. And the best part is, that made my writing better, too, because I was writing in controlled fashion instead of riding the crest of the inspirational wave until exhaustion hit and things got sloppy.
So in summary, my muse was a mean drunk, but I’ve gotten to the point where we can have a regular sit-down on the back deck to just sip a companionable drink every evening. Write regularly, write within the bounds of reason, and it adds up in terms of both quality and quantity.
DP: You have a chance to tell anyone breaking into the industry one thing. What is it?
RD: Goodness, I tell people breaking into the industry lots of things all the time. Very senior people were very kind to me when I first broke in, and so I have always tried to pay that forward in turn.
With that in mind, though, I would say this: It is not going to be easy, but that does not mean it’s not worth trying. Only you can decide if you really want to do this, but make that decision knowing it’s going to be a tough road with a lot of hard work and probably a lot of time put in on games you might not have wanted to work on if you had your druthers. But if you really want to do this, then make the effort to find the value and find the joy in every step along the way, and remember you’ve never done your best work, just your best work so far.
DP: And finally, just for fun, I have it on good authority that you are one of the leading experts on Danebian Slime Devils. If I served it for dinner, what drink would you say pairs well with it?
RD: I know the obvious choice is Romulan ale, but I feel Saurian brandy is probably a better choice to bring out the complexity of the flavor in your average Slime Devil filet.
Which, incidentally, you’ll probably want to be careful not to overcook. Slime Devil’s a very lean meat, like bison, and so if you don’t get a good sear on to lock in the juices, you’re going to be left with a very expensive strip of aggressive leather.
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