Writers Guild of America Game Nominations

Writing the plotline and story for a computer game may sound easy to you, but in reality it's quite hard. There's lots of plotting, drafting and imagineering to do and it's never as simple as just "Kill him with a big gun". Plus, there's lots of filing to do.

Finally and for the first time ever, the Writers Guild of America has seen fit to recognise the amount of work and dedication that goes into writing the story for a computer game and, frankly, they couldn't have seen a better year to start. In 2007 we had BioShock, Half-Life: Episode 2, Mass Effect and the first Call of Duty game with an original plotline. Ripe pickings, eh?

Of course, the Writers Guild is new to all this computer business, so naturally none of those games made the list. Instead, they've decided that the cream of the crop is as follows...

Crash of the Titans -- Written by Christopher Mitchell for Sierra Entertainment
Dead Head Fred -- Written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan for D3 Publisher
The Simpsons Game -- With lead writer Matt Selman, written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, dialogue by Jeff Poliquin for EA
The Witcher -- With lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, dialogue by Sebastian Stepien, additional dialogue by Marcin Blacha and writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole for Atari
World in Conflict -- Story design by Christofer Emgard, story consultant Larry Bond and script consultant Ed Zuckerman for Sierra Entertainment.

OK, so the last two are fair cop, but Crash of the Titans? Really?

Ah well, if you just want to learn more about what goes in to writing and designing a computer game then you can always check out our regular feature on game design - the latest installment of which looks specifically at World in Conflict, funnily enough. Otherwise, why not swing by the forums and let us know what you think?