by John Dale Beety

Editor’s note: This is the first installment in our five-part series “Playtesting Game Narratives,” curated by SFWA’s Game Writing Committee.

In science fiction and fantasy (SFF) terms, game writing is exactly what it sounds like: writing for games. Calling oneself a game writer, however, is akin to declaring oneself a scientist. Divisions within game writing include game media, such as board games and video games; forms, such as planning dialogue trees and naming collectible cards; and publishers, from solo efforts to some of the world’s largest corporations.

This post introduces a series on playtesting, the process of improving games through hands-on feedback. Think of it as an editing pass for games, though with a twist. Unlike prose writing, which usually presents a single, stable experience for readers, games depend on player choices to create a range of experiences, from an early Game Over to a grand finale years in the making. Playtesting allows games to deliver great experiences for the greatest number of players. 

By playing through a game and observing other players, playtesters can identify problems to fix, such as consistent reports of a disliked quest or a moment when story and gameplay mechanics seem to clash. Playtesters can be game-makers or outside parties, and it’s not uncommon to see the game-writing equivalents of authors and beta readers side by side in a multiplayer game’s playtesting sessions.

Future posts will offer specific insights on playtesting from experts in board games, card games, tabletop role-playing games, and video games. Here are brief overviews of those four game types, and the writing opportunities they provide.

Board Games

Board games easily have the longest history among the four, with the earliest surviving game boards over four millennia old. All but the most abstract board games have a storytelling component—chess as a battle of two armies, for instance—and narratively-driven board games in English have been on the rise since the 1990s thanks to the success of Catan and other European-style board games.

Game writing opportunities in board games include theming, such as the Kim Stanley Robinson-inspired science fiction of Terraforming Mars, and sometimes character design, as in recent editions of Clue (also known as Cluedo) that take the suspects from stock characters to full personalities. Space is short when writing for board games; flash fiction authors and speculative poets are likely to feel more at home than novelists.

Editor’s note: For more on this, read “Playtesting Narrative Content in Board Games” by Will McDermott.

Card Games

In the context of game writing, card games refers to games with specifically printed cards, as opposed to those played with a standardized deck. The first major game with specifically printed cards was Magic: The Gathering, which debuted in 1993, and the Japanese imports Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! propelled such card games to the American mainstream. And despite trading card games’ many rivals for entertainment spending, Magic: The Gathering alone generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2022.

Game writing for card games presents a challenge because much of the storytelling is nonlinear. There is no guarantee of players seeing cards in an exact sequence, so card names and flavor text (storytelling snippets not affecting the rules) must stand independently. As with board games, card games tend to favor brief, impactful writing. More so than board games, however, they also can offer opportunities for longer tie-in narratives, such as a comic in a rule book or the Magic: The Gathering fiction commissioned and published by Wizards of the Coast.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games

The tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) descended from wargaming or Kriegsspiel, the Prussian-born practice of using games to simulate battles, and came into its own with the publication of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1974. TTRPGs, now running on a variety of rules systems, offer a platform for players (and often a moderator) to mutually construct a story, over one session or many, with dice rolls or other random effects adding variety to the gameplay.

The gamebook is the fundamental unit of the TTRPG. Some gamebooks are for players, such as the iconic D&D Player’s Handbook for character creation and gameplay rules. Others are for game masters (sometimes abbreviated GMs), the facilitators of TTRPGs, such as adventure books that let a game master guide a group of players through a series of quests that tell a cohesive story. Compared to board and card games, TTRPG game writing offers far greater scope for long-form narratives that can unspool over months or even years of players’ time.

Video Games

Like TTRPGs, video games as an industry date to the early 1970s, with 1972 bringing both the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and the first definitive hit video game, Pong. The adventure game genre, named for 1976’s Colossal Cave Adventure, brought text-based storytelling to video games, and subsequent increases in computing power and technology have allowed for ever more elaborate gameplay and storytelling. Video games have become a massive commercial force, with the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V being plausibly the most profitable entertainment product of all time.

Writing for video games can be as simple as a few lines of scene-setting text or as complex as the script for the Nebula Award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3, whose two-million-word script includes dozens of hours of cinematics written like film or television scripts, dialogue trees whose branches multiply with each choice, a lengthy main story and numerous side stories, missions and quests, and many smaller pieces of writing such as item descriptions. Seemingly minor pieces of video game writing can have outsized impact, such as a character’s “barks” or one-liners delivered during combat, which a player may hear hundreds of times over the course of a game.

Playtest That Quest

Whether you’re making an indie game by yourself or contracting for a multinational conglomerate’s AAA franchise, playtesting is an essential step in game writing. Watch for more installments in this series to learn how to playtest various types of games and keep the fun flowing!

John Dale Beety (he/him) is a copy editor for a gaming strategy site and a former coin expert for an auction house. His first game writing client was Wizards of the Coast, using up all of his authorial luck points in a single throw. Due to an incident aired on national television, he holds a lifelong grudge against the long-dead department store magnate Rowland Hussey Macy.