If you're hoping to pursue a career in game narrative, make sure to check out Anna Megill's upcoming book, The Game Writing Guide: Get Your Dream Job and Keep It. The book is set to be published on May 22nd. Pre-orders have just gone live, with a 20% off offer available through her Twitter page, HERE.
Control fans may know her best as the Narrative Lead at Remedy, where she worked on establishing the lore and, unfortunately for our sanity, the Threshold Kids. Since departing the studio in November 2018, she moved to Massive Entertainment as their Lead Writer for two years. She now lives in the UK as Playground Games' Narrative Lead, working on the next Fable title.
Today, she spoke a little about how the project came to be, stating "when I started talking about being a game writer on social media, I was sort of flooded with people asking for advice, and wanting to get into the industry. And no one had any information; it was like, little bits and pieces. So I wanted to help them. I remembered what it was like to not know any of this, so I wrote up an FAQ of the questions people were asking me. And I just, sort of, let it sit there and be a resource for people, and time ticked by and people were still using that as one of their primary resources... but the industry had changed a lot. I realised that a lot of the information I had in it wasn't useful anymore; people were still writing to me with questions that weren't covered in the FAQ and I thought 'I should really update this.' But then once I collated all that information and I saw how extensive the rehaul was going to be, and how much information people were really thirsty for. I thought, 'This isn't an FAQ anymore. This is a book.'
"An important thing to note is that this is not a book about the craft of writing. I'm not going to be like, step-by-step "this is how you write a video game." What my book covers are the unspoken rules of becoming a game writer. What you need to know to get into the industry, and to stay in the industry, and to build a career as a game writer. It's answering the questions that were in my initial FAQ and taking those and expanding on them. If you are a complete newcomer and don't know anything about games, there's no jargon, [and] there's no insider knowledge you have to have. I will speak to you in plain language about how to become a game writer. And it's not just my take on this information; I spoke to, on and off the record, over fifty really talented game writers and people in game narrative about the solutions that they found for all these situations. Everyone shared their knowledge and I collated all of it and put it into this book."
You can pre-order the book via Routledge, HERE!
