Writers Guild of America game nominees announced
The Writer's Guild of America has nominated a typically odd list of games for the annual games award.
Modern Warfare 2, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves are Assassin's Creed 2 sit as the most obvious and, perhaps, deserved nominees - but the list is spoiled by two more dubious inclusions. Check the list below.
- Assassin's Creed II: Story by Corey May, Script Writers Corey May, Joshua Rubin, Jeffrey Yohalem; Ubisoft Entertainment
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Written by Jesse Stern, Additional Writing Steve Fukuda, Story by Todd Alderman, Steve Fukuda, Mackey McCandlish, Zied Rieke, Jesse Stern, Jason West, Battlechatter Dialogue, Sean Slayback; Activision
- Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Written by Amy Hennig; Sony Computer Entertainment
- Wet, Written by Duppy Demetrius; Bethesda Softworks
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Script Writer Marc Guggenheim; Activision
The nominees are certainly better than they were last year, where The Force Unleashed walked away with the prize after trouncing Fallout 3, Red Alert 3 and Tomb Raider: Underworld.
The WGA has often been criticised for how it selects winners, with only members of the guild being elegible for nomination.
Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Previous Article
13 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyI really enjoyed the story in AC2, glad it's getting a nomination.
I actually totally agree with WET being including, as arguably the best part of that game was it's lead character (well voiced by Eliza Dusku). They followed in the Half-life 2 tradition of having a heroine that isn't overly sexualised.
As to the quality of the rest of the game, I cannot comment other than to say that while playing the demo, my girlfriend 'liked' it which is probably the best praise anyone has given WET (she actively dislikes video games).
If anything, the most dubious nomination is Modern Warfare 2. While I enjoyed the game, the writing and dialogue sounded like a retarded Michael Bay rewriting an episode of Generation Kill.
The post is Oscar Mike.
I must say that I don't know about WET and never played X-men but today's movie adapted games aren't so good since the movie wasn't quite that nice
Batman is Batman, and Dragon Age's story was practically a Xerox of Mass Effect awesome game nonetheless.
Secondly, we don't nominate the games ourselves, we depend upon the game writers to do so. If a game you loved isn't here, it's probably because it wasn't nominated. Sometimes this can take the form of the writer being too lazy to send in the application form, other times, it's because a company is terrified of unions (Electronic Arts) and won't allow their employees to nominate themselves for an award given out by a dirty, dirty union (cough cough Microsoft cough).
Thirdly, we are a Guild of Writers... we will not allow the nomination of a game where the company doesn't credit the Writer. EVERY game has actor credits... our stance is that we're at least as important as the actors (if not moreso, as usually they wouldn't have a job without a writer first putting words in their mouths). So, sadly, some games fall by the wayside because the company has an archaic and random manner of crediting their employees, such as alphabetically and without job titles attached (to make it harder for competitors to steal their employees, I suspect). If those companies make a good faith effort to credit their writers in the Press or online, we have been known to change our minds, but that's sadly the reason that games like Bioshock or Resistance haven't been nominated in the past... because the Developer likes to pretend that they don't have writers.
Because we're judging the WRITING in the game, we need a script to read. That's why we don't just pick a game from amongst the games we've enjoyed that year and say "oh, Death Kill 6 was the best written game of the year" -- because we're judging the writing, not the gameplay. These games are read and judged by professional game writers who are members of the WGA. Teams of five writers score each game, and the five highest-scoring games are the nominees, and are then read again by a separate panel of game writers (some of the biggest in the business). Our winner genuinely reflects the best writing in games from amongst the games submitted to us, which is all we can accurately judge.