Interview with Portal writer Erik Wolpaw

Published November 1, 2007 by Morgan Nichol | Comments (2)

As you’d expect, he’s a smart, charming sounding guy. But then I love me some self-deprecation.

As a novelist, you just need to think of a few decent strings of words and then fill the other 98% of the book with more or less random descriptions of things and exclamation points. In a game, the 98% garbage section is filled with the actual game. Even worse for game writers, the 98% garbage part of a game isn’t even usually garbage because instead of reading something boring about the history of Belgium, the “reader” probably gets to jump a Camaro over a dinosaur. That means the pressure’s on to make the two percent wordy part that you’re responsible for really, really spectacular. It’s a tough job.

Read it over at Rock Paper Shotgun.

  • http://writerscabal.wordpress.com/ Anne

    True… and most people don’t take the worst part of a book and say it represents the entire thing, like they do with game writing. You could find one string of dialog that is bad, but you ignore the fact that someone also wrote in the “jumping a camaro over a dinosaur.” The dialog as well as the camaro were both approved by the same developer!

  • http://www.the-monkey.net Morgan

    Bad writing is bad writing. Can we at least agree that the writing in Portal is – camaro or not – really good?

 
 
     
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