This article is part of the Get Into Games feature presentation. Check out the rest of the series for a complete look into the reality of getting a gaming career, as told to us by some of the industry’s best talent.

We’ve all heard the one about the 16bit developer penning a classic game premise on the back of a cigarette packet, but writing for today’s games is a different story. Though it struggles to earn the respect of literary scholars or the unionised Hollywood machine, storytelling in games is at least breaking free of its old prison: the non-interactive cutscene. As Half-Life 2 writer Marc Laidlaw keenly reminds us, the presence of an in-house writer can dramatically enhance a game’s originality and verve. And, after the rampant success of Portal, the industry agrees.

How did you get started as a writer?

I always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was young, that was what I did and worked on, and I found myself becoming a full-time writer of fiction and short stories. I was interested in writing movies, but it didn’t seem like a very good fit. From what I knew about being a director, organising that many people to get your vision across was very intimidating. As I became more aware of games, around the time of Quake, I just felt that was the thing I’d been unknowingly preparing myself for all along.

Is it a day-to-day job like coding or art?

I work alongside the whole team through the whole game – it’s pretty much always been that way with Half-Life. We’ve tried it different ways, like having me in the room with the guys building the levels and doing the code, but as the team’s got bigger it’s become harder being with all of the people all of the time. So we’ve splintered off, and people will now come to me with problems.

There’s always a fine balance between dramatic elements and gameplay; wanting those dramatic elements to emerge through gameplay rather than cutscenes is a big thing here. I know that’s not the case with every company, but we try to keep fully integrated. Portal, for instance, is something where they’d worked on the game mechanic for a long time, Erik Wolpaw stepping in while things were still in flux to enhance the experience through the writing.

The avenues into writing don’t seem the same as for the rest of gaming.

I do tell writers to try and get involved with mods. The stories for those always seem to predate any feeling for gameplay, so they’d benefit, just as any studio would, from early involvement with someone passionate about storytelling. It’s a good way for the writer to start learning about the other disciplines involved in game creation; it certainly was an education for me. If you want to have a deep effect on the game you’re working on, the more you can understand the tools, the more you can get your vision across. A lot of what goes on around you is extremely technical, and not at all related to how dramatic the scene is going to be.

What’s the ideal portfolio?

There’s still nothing better than professional publication in respected markets for fiction. In the UK you’ve got Interzone, for example. At least then you’ve got a standard; you can say: “Look, I’ve done work that other people considered was worth paying money for. I saw this thing through and I’ve got this body of work to show for it.” That’s still the thing I fall back on. I’d hate to say it was the only way, but it’s hard right now because there’s no way to get feedback from people who are doing the same thing. There aren’t that many giants to compare yourself to.

How about comic book writing?

A lot of people are going back and forth between games and comic books. There’s a component of narrative structuring you’re doing there that’s purely visual, that’s really important in games. So Joshua Ortega has gone from doing comic adaptations for Gears Of War to writing Gears Of War 2. And game reviews: Chet [Faliszek] and Erik did their site [Old Man Murray] for a long time, developed their own style and voice, and then Erik ended up writing Psychonauts and Portal.

What kind of job security is there in this particular line of work?

That might be one reason why a lot of writers contract on games at this point, and it may be the most useful model for companies for a long time. As an employee, the attraction is being able to go from project to project, one world to another. When I started working in the industry there was a lot of curiosity; now, you hear a lot of producers voicing their commitment to story. Whole studios like Ubisoft clearly say in their press releases how story is this unifying force in everything they do. Things are certainly stabilising.