Writers' Strike Helping Games?
With eight weeks under its belt, the Hollywood writers' strike has begun to effect just about everyone I know, including my 80yo father who hardly ever watches the moving picture box in his home but was as happy as all get-out when he opened his shiny new Nintendo DS and New York Times Crosswords and Picross games. Is my daddy a weathervane of style at last? Or is this a universal "teachable moment" for gaming, in which more people than ever are turning to the last functional devices plugged into their televisions?
The Associated Press thinks so, as does AIAS president Joseph Olin:
"If you're a fan of network programming, maybe seeing another repeat of 'Pushing Daisies' or 'Cold Case' will inspire you to finish that level of 'Ratchet and Clank Future' instead."
While the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have rattled their shields at the game industry before, notably in 2005 when they threatened to strike until they nabbed a 36% pay raise for voice actors in video games, the games industry is particularly unaffected by the current political malaise destroying the idiot box. Only 'a handful' of games writers are represented by the WGA and they remain unaffected by the strike.
The role of writers is often underestimated in the games biz, but with thousands of lines of dialog and plenty of instructional or descriptive text, somebody's gotta be manning the pen. When Telltale Games set out to create the CSI series of games for Ubisoft, it wasn't the show's writers but CSI novelist Max Allan Collins who was tapped to write the script.
"Anytime we have the ability to work with writers, it improves the quality of the game," says Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games. "They're a great body of talent that generates a ton of creative work."
Hear that? Writers. Oh yeah. So if anyone wants the script for the next blockbuster genre-busting video game, I'll be in my room. Writing. Like a fox.
Video game industry capitalizing on writers' strike [CNN]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 28 December 2007
Other stuff like this: games, prime time, wga, writer's guild of america, writers strike
