A Video Game Writer's Toolkit

Video game writing, as a field, is very hard to pin down. Games are multimedia, and different games can have wildly different narrative presentations. The output of a writer working on a visual novel is going to look very different from the output of a writer working on a AAA action-adventure game. As such, it's tempting to say that there is in fact no such thing as video game writing; that these are really distinct and unrelated skillsets, perhaps even more similar to other forms of fiction writing than they are to one another. I don't actually think this is the case. It is undoubtedly a broader and more diverse field than, say, writing screenplays for commercial feature films; few if any writers can really take any writing role anywhere in video games and do great things with it. But this also isn't particularly special; novelists have preferred genres, television writers tend to stick around in certain industry segments. Experience is always constrained relative to the breadth of…