Guys. Guys. Guys. Richard Morgan has signed onto EA to write games for them. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!
1. Who is Richard Morgan? Turn to paragraph (3).
2. OMG, srsly, best news ever. Turn to paragraph (4).
(3) Go hang yourself.
(4) INORITE. (King) Richard Morgan, premiere (awesome) dystopian sci-fi/hardboiled cyberpunk writer of such (totally rad) instant classics as Altered Carbon and Market Forces and everything else he’s published, is now writing games for EA. It’s like someone just reinvented cupcakes or something.
I’m a bit of a fan. I’m also a bit of a fan of good writing in games, but that’s admittedly hard to be a fan of because it hardly ever actually happens. Um, let’s see… Planescape Torment. That’s about it*. The fact is, game development companies shove all their budget cash into making nice graphics and nice guns and nice boob physics, and only at the end of it all do they drag in a couple of barely literate illegal immigrants from the mail room and tell them to slap something sort of kinda maybe storyish on top of everything in exchange for a jam sandwich and not calling up border patrol. Well, I’m guessing.
Writing for games is harder than it looks. I know, because I’ve worked on a few myself, and I can attest that writing complex dialogue interaction queues at 3am just before deadline is really a lot harder than it looks. Valve’s Marc Laidlaw and Eric Wolpaw have better, more interesting things to say about all of that.
It’s probably somewhat like the early film-making industry. While technicians dithered around with bone cameras strapped up in raptor pelts, nobody was especially bothered with such irrelevant esoterica as scripts and plot arcs. In this analogy, gaming has just about arrived at the part where they’re getting rotoscoping to work – it’s come a long way, but nobody’s thought of green screens yet. And back in reality, we’ve got nice graphics and nice guns and nice boob physics, and the reason it’s all there is because there’s this one bad guy who has to be stopped or the world is going to end (!!!!!11111) and maybe the occasional chupacabra or leshy.
But let’s talk about Richard Morgan again. Now that Richard Morgan is working for EA, the sorry state of game narrative is going to turn hard and fast. This is the guy who wrote that, “Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.”
Picking liberally from his magnificent oeuvre, even I’ve managed to come up with all sort of amazing ideas for EA to cash in.
The Sims: The 26th Century Generation
Now equipped with digitised consciousness and somatic resleeving technology, Sims can effectively achieve immortality. Explore an entirely unprecedented scope of gameplay now that removing the pool ladder has no immediate benefit. Exploit and oppress your Sims in all sorts of new and exciting new ways.
Madden NFL: Envoy Corps
Now equipped with digitised consciousness and somatic resleeving technology, football players can effectively achieve immortality. So they’re armed with beam rifles. “Half-time” just took on a totally new and exciting meaning.
Need for Speed: Pro Needlecast
Now equipped with digitised consciousness and somatic resleeving technology, there’s something almost a bit kind of maybe different about this new entry in the Need for Speed franchise that’s probably mostly restricted to a few decals on the cars. Everyone will buy it anyway! \:D/
Seriously, though, I hope he’s working on Dead Space 2. Anything else is just bonus.
* Okay, okay. Portal too. And Braid. And a whole bunch of others.
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