The Writers Room

I'd say that I have enough choices. One of the things we don't want to do at Sidelines is just scattershot a bunch of writers at whatever comes in - I take quite seriously what they're creating... but then I also don't want to pigeon-hole.

The writer that went on to Relentless' Blue Toad Murder Files came from a totally different game, but it just happens that he has kids and just 'got' the whole genre.

But whether or not it's specialist depends really on the game - if somebody's putting out a new concept then it might take a while to wrap my head around it, whereas if it's a more traditional genre then we can find a good number of people.

The writing industry is so vast that you're not going to have a problem finding someone, somewhere - even if we bring someone on board just for that project that we don't represent full time. We keep relationships open with writers who we can't take on full time, but who might have specific backgrounds that would be really useful for certain titles.

It depends on the project - it might be that one of the big PC games has a team of writers, with a narrative designer, someone to do AI stuff, a dialogue specialist (especially if there's an accent on there).

We've worked on games where we've had to bring on writers from different countries - American, Australian and English are all very different, particularly if you're talking about things like military slang and terminology. You need a team of writers for something like that.

I hope so - I'm probably not the right person to answer that for the current catalogue of games, but if we have strong writers who are able to tell stories in whatever form, if they can then do that for games as well it's only going to get better.

But I wouldn't really say that I've seen briefs that are asking for high emotion, or the more tender emotions yet. Though I think that will keep on developing - hopefully the types of games that we've seen are going to keep on expanding, and there will room.

Yes, I think among the writers who are working in the industry, if anything there was a bit of frustration that there were writers in the US who weren't working, and saying they could bide their time doing games... when there's a whole set of talented people working on this as their profession. It was like: "Alright, we don't need you!"

I think it's just that it hasn't caught up in the way that games writers don't have a lot of representation over the world. I'm sure it will though, whether it's under the same union or a separate group. I don't think it's saying it's not a skilled area, just maybe not old enough to be counted.

Both the UK and US unions do now give awards for games, so it has been recognised.

Over a dozen now. Our most recent signing is Antony Johnston - Side had recorded Dead Space: Extraction, and everybody who worked on the project said that it was good writing. He also wrote the original comic, then signed on to do the first game - and now Extraction.

He's one of the guys who the rest of the time is working on graphic novels.