All things considered, it’s a good time to be a writer.

Sure there are thousands of eager aspiring scribes competing with us for a tiny handful of jobs. Sure we are forced to wade through a mire of misinformation, shoddy writing advice books and dodgy companies, not to mention our frequent struggles with crippling self-doubt.

And yet, in spite of all this, I’ve seen things that give me hope.

Fahrenheit, for example. Known as Indigo Prophecy in the U.S., it represents a major leap forward in the way we think about videogames. Videogame critics - a horribly ineffective bunch at the best of times - hardly know what to make of it, but it has received attention from other critical arenas. It’s been plastered with labels like ‘interactive drama’ and ‘unique immersive experience’. I only know what I saw.

There were three of us sitting around the TV, watching enthralled as my friend played through the game. It was his second run through, so he had the controls pretty much figured out. A new scene started, and the main character was walking through a lonely cemetery to meet his brother at the site of their parents’ graves. His face was haggard from a night of sleepless worry. A light snow fell around him, frosting the tops of solemn gravestones and mausoleums. The screen separated into a De Palma-style splitscreen, one frame tracking around him, another in wide shot panning across the cemetery, and another close on the character’s face. I was caught in the moment. I was watching a film.

Then the character stopped, turned around, went back the way he’d come. My friend said, “Dammit, I’ve gone the wrong way”, and I realised for the first time that he had been controlling the scene.

That realisation is something I have rarely ever experienced in a videogame, because the average game does not strive towards cinema or story. Fahrenheit is something different, a ‘cinema simulator’ if you will. The only other games I can possibly compare it to are Shenmue (Dreamcast) and Shenmue 2 (Xbox), which were part of an incredibly ambitious but now discontinued saga that was supposed to be released in eight installments and chronicle several years of the main character’s life. The ahead-of-its-time Shenmue series utilised the same techniques of scene framing and reflexive action sequence controls that Fahrenheit has now incorporated.

So why is this so exciting for writers? Because videogames are now more than 25 years old, and fast approaching that point in the history of a medium when it breaks free from the bonds of novelty and asserts itself as a meaningful artform. Today, the typical videogame development team consists mostly of programmers and graphic artists; the lack of professional writers is one reason game plots and dialogue are, in the majority, awful. Some developers, chiefly those specialising in computer RPGs, have built their reputations on the fact that they employ real writers, and can therefore churn out a fairly engaging story.

In this fascinating diary, Fahrenheit’s lead developer David Cage reveals something of how he wrote the script:

Writing the full game design document took me about a year to complete. The final script is about 2000 pages and integrates absolutely everything; story, characters, gameplay, structure, branching dialogs, horrible sketches, maps and storyboards (I am terrible at drawing), instructions to remember for acting and directing, indications about music and sounds and much more. With the experience of another very complex game (Omikron), I have established some rules for my game designs in order to put all the possible information in there while keeping them clear (I hope). This document was the master document for the whole production. It was truly our “bible”, the absolute reference for everything.

That’s 2000 pages, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the equivalent of writing 20 feature film scripts, while keeping track of every branching twist and turn the player might possibly take. That’s some serious writing.

The videogame industry is already bigger than Hollywood. Maybe some day, teams of writers will work alongside engineers and artists to create interactive cinema unlike anything we can imagine. When you tell someone you’re a screenwriter, they may just have to ask: “Film, TV or game?”

BLOGKEEPING: My apologies for the lack of updates, Gentle Readers. I’ve been having some problems. All I can say is: Don’t sign up with Ozemail. They may be the shittiest ISP in all of human, nay universal, history.

I solemnly swear to update lots more once my internet actually starts working again. Here are just a few of the mind-expanding, life-affirming topics I’ll be posting about in the next few weeks:

Why I love ’80s fantasy films.

The importance of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The genius of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

And the next installment in the wildly popular Xander-Recommends-A-Book series: Bullfinch’s Mythology.

In fact, why don’t you all tell me what you want me to post next? Get thee hence to the comments section and debate about it! Debate for my amusement!