Truly great video games owe their quality to exceptional narrative, according to Micah Nathan. For Nathan, learning to create these narratives came from pursuing a liberal arts education.
“The importance of my education is that it taught me how to think,” said Nathan, chief story officer and co-founder of video game company Consortium 9. “My liberal arts education helped me because it made me comfortable with uncertainty.”
At a lecture on Tuesday afternoon titled, “How Not to Write for Video Games: The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education,” Nathan said that starting a career in video game writing requires relentless networking and writing, as well as seizing all opportunities.
“I just kept taking whatever jobs I could,” Nathan said. “I just kept learning. The one thing that was consistent was my craft. Never stop writing.”
Eventually, a video game company offered him a spot on its team, Nathan said. The company needed him to write a cutscene—a non-interactive dialogue scene in a video game. He explained that the task served as a sort of audition to become a video game writer.
“I came to this job thinking it was going to be easy to do everything,” Nathan said. “I realized I didn’t know anything about how it works.”
Coming to terms with all he had to learn, Nathan said it was important to challenge himself to think more creatively and broadly to enhance his storytelling skills.
“You owe it to yourself to take courses that don’t have answer keys and that require you to think,” Nathan said.
Later, while teaching creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nathan said students would ask him for a consistent algorithm or method to develop strong creative writing. He said sometimes there is no one answer—thinking imaginatively is essential to understanding the craft of storytelling.
“In order to build a world, I had to understand the world I live in,” Nathan said.
Nathan also said that an excellent video game has a vast background story even though players will only see the tip of the iceberg.
“The purpose of games, for me, is to let the writer shrink away,” Nathan said. “To let the play happen.”
Strong storytelling impacts all aspects of a video game, making narrative writing vital to the art of video games.
“They wrote a whole world—you can feel it when you play,” Nathan said. “You can tell when the writer has done work on the game, even if there’s no storyline. The story seems to infuse every part
