PERSPECTIVE

Write it like you stole it

JON INGOLD

So I wrote a column in Edge over this past year, and I’ve gone the whole time without talking about generative AI, which is good, because it’s a topic with little that’s interesting to be said. But this is my final column, so I thought I’d better scrape the bottom of the barrel before I close.

There has, for the whole time I’ve been working in games, been a productive pushpull between the two forces who want to drive the bus of the thing we call narrative. The first force is the artist: the pure-snow writer, who sits behind a desk plucking words like flowers from the meadow of their mind, binding them into bouquets and stabbing them through with a pin! This writer produces the script for their game in Final Draft Pro and it is perfect in every way, building from a tight, mi-clos-style opening via the Brechtian mode into a breathless, explosive climax that will mark itself orgasmically on the soul and body of their audience. Script delivered, they leave for sandy equatorial beaches and the writing class they run to find people to sleep with. This writer is a profound investigator of the human soul; they are a colonialist and a sex pest. They are quite sure of only one thing: they have no real talent and will be cancelled literally any second now.