Writing for the LCD: FPS games

Final Thoughts

We've had a look now at some of the biggest issues writers face today when tackling a first-person shooter project. How do writers take advantage of the first-person perspective in a game to tell gripping stories, what types of stories can they tell and should these stories be long and singular entities or should they be smaller, staggered releases? These are the questions we've tried to answer as we've examined what difficulties are posed by writing an FPS.

The strengths of the first-person shooter genre are obvious and many from a writing standpoint. First and foremost is that the viewpoint forces players to get inside their character's head and experience the game from a more personal perspective, making character interactions and responses more realistic and intuitive, especially as the technology grows to accommodate the writer's desires.
The first-person perspective is also one of the most useful and provocative tools a writer can use as it allows players the chance to empathise more with the characters and see the world around them displayed in a close-up and interesting manner.

This ability to force players to experience games as their characters is the single most impressive and attractive aspect of the FPS genre to a writer, despite the problems presented by the viewpoint in certain specific events. Thankfully careful writing and character design, coupled with advancing technology and some clever technical tricks – such as using a camera which is attached to a third-person model - are often able to disguise or eradicate these issues.


One thing which is constantly interesting about the first-person perspective is how prominent it is in games compared to movies and written stories. In games, practically every other title is a FPS game and almost all of the major releases for the last five years have used the FPS template in some way, from Half-Life 2 and Prey to the upcoming Haze and Crysis, yet in cinema there are hardly any movies which harness a first-person view and the only ones in recent memory are The Blair Witch Project and Doom, the latter of which doesn't really count in our opinion since it just copies the game.

In books however the first-person perspective is more commonly used, though not a majority, so it seems odd that it's so prevalent in modern gaming culture.

The reason for this is most likely that games are an interactive medium and therefore recognise that the first-person perspective is the most natural one to use when presenting an environment from the viewpoint of a single character. Books and movies meanwhile choose generally to seize a third-person point of view as it frees them from the very difficulties which Rob pointed out earlier on; a third-person perspective allows the writer of a book or movie the opportunity to cut away to some off-screen action a lot more fluidly.

Of course, there are games which work around this cut-away issue quite cleverly, like Halo 2 which switched characters between Master Chief and The Arbiter characters in the first person perspective. Another notable example is No One Lives Forever 2 which cast players Cate Archer, 60s super-spy, in the single-player campaign but which would cut-away to third-person cutscenes to relay information to players. There were a handful of times where Cate would be incapacitated suddenly and players would have to jump into a co-op game, which cast them as Cate's support team, in order to fill in the blanks in the story – a novel way to fill in certain grey areas of story via first-person action.


Wrapping things up, it looks like this year is going to be a stonker for story-driven FPS games. Not only do we have Haze and Crysis to look forward to, but also on the horizon is Clive Barker's Jericho, another game designed from concept-up by a talented and professional writer. That all goes without mentioning the latest instalment in the Half-Life 2: Episodes series, written by Marc Laidlaw, Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek.

The FPS genre is one which is obviously appealing to a lot of writers right now for the ability to pull in gamers and keep them on the edge of their seats in the depths of the writer's imagination and with high-calibre writers attached to a growing number of projects it seems that the entire genre is evolving so that the writing and character design can finally keep pace with the technology driving the FPS genre.

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In our next instalment about game writing, we'll be tackling a genre close to many hearts and having a chat with some developers from some of the best adventure games ever made. If there's anything in particular you want to know about or someone you think we should talk to, then drop into the community and let us know – we handle everything collaboratively here.