Susan O’Connor thinks we may be close to entering a golden age of storytelling in video games. But for that to happen, the freelance game writer told the Georgia Straight, game developers need to call her sooner rather than later.

O’Connor—whose credits include some of the biggest games of the past few years, including Gears of War, BioShock, and Far Cry 2—has just wrapped up work on an as-yet-unannounced game. By phone from her office in Austin, Texas, the writer explained her biggest problem is that studios wait too long before bringing her in to help. It’s a problem, she said, because so much of the writing really has to be done at the beginning of a project.

On the phone from her Los Angeles home office, Marianne Krawczyk agreed with O’Connor. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ”˜We’ll start you as soon as we have the story figured out,’ ” said Krawczyk, a freelance game writer who has worked on the God of War games.

“Most people think the writer comes in to write the dialogue,” Krawczyk noted. But, she said, “Writers can very specifically focus on story.”

O’Connor and Krawczyk will tell Vancouver’s game developers what writers can do for them when they speak on Tuesday (May 12) at the inaugural Game Developers Conference Canada. The two-day event, part of Vancouver Digital Week, runs until Wednesday (May 13) at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

The writers’ message, O’Connor said, is simple: “Call us up. Because here’s the thing—we have this experience, we’ve made these games, we know how to make a good story in a game.”

According to her, when studios do bring writers in early, great things can happen. Vancouver’s Radical Entertainment engaged her early for a project, and even though the game ended up getting cancelled, she enjoyed working on it. “Nobody was married to anything in terms of gameplay or story, and we were able to work together,” O’Connor said.

Krawczyk feels the same way. She was brought in early on to work on the first God of War title. She explained that David Jaffe, the game’s designer, didn’t have the story mapped out but he knew the space in which he wanted to tell that story. “The story drove how the design worked, and it became seamless,” she said.

Often, the work of crafting a story falls to the game designers. Although these people are rarely writers, O’Connor said, they know the kind of experience they want to create. “Sometimes game designers really have a vision,” she said. This can lead to a reluctance to hire a writer early in the process, due to the fear that the writer will come in and destroy the story. “The reality,” O’Connor said, “is that a writer is going to come in and do nothing but enhance the story and make sure it really works.”

Krawczyk said another challenge writers face is that people often don’t value their profession because everyone thinks they’re a writer. “If you can’t draw, you know you can’t draw, but everybody can write an e-mail,” Krawczyk joked.

While Krawczyk would like to see more rooms of writers who work collaboratively in game development, she’s not hopeful that many studios will decide to add writers to their staff to work in-house like animators and programmers. When a game’s budget gets cut, she said, the first things to go are the writer and the story. But she also believes that the move to on-line distribution will lead to more episodic games. As a former television writer, she knows this will require teams of writers working together.

BioWare, an Edmonton studio that’s part of Electronic Arts, is something of an exception. Renowned for its role-playing and story-driven games, BioWare has always employed staff writers, who participate in projects from the beginning. BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk will also attend GDC Canada, delivering a keynote address Wednesday entitled Emotionally Engaging Narrative: Gaming’s New Frontier.

This sounds like the golden age envisioned by Krawczyk and O’Connor—a future where the story is as important as the gameplay, one where the story informs what players do. “Once we can get players as engaged in playing the story [as in gameplay],” Krawczyk said, “then we’ll start to see the power of the medium. Because you’ll be experiencing it.”

O’Connor sees the golden age as a period when developers commit to creating games with compelling premises that go beyond big guns and get into “morally dubious and complex worlds”.

“And there’s going to be a movement away from relying on dialogue to communicate story, and a better understanding of how to tell a story kinetically,” she said.

She hopes this golden age arrives soon. “I want to be in that world,” O’Connor said.