Chapter 21 — Further Reading

A curated reading, watching, and playing list for game writing and character design. Start with two or three; return to the rest as you build.

Books on Game Writing

Evan Skolnick — Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know About Narrative Techniques A short, production-focused primer. Skolnick worked at Activision and other studios; his framing is practical rather than theoretical. A good first book on game writing specifically.

Wendy Despain — Writing for Video Game Genres (editor) An anthology of essays by working game writers, each covering a specific genre's writing conventions. FPS writing, RPG writing, platformer writing, and more. Useful as a reference when starting a project in an unfamiliar genre.

Richard Dansky — Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (editor) The IGDA Writing SIG's foundational volume. Older (2007) but still relevant for core principles. Includes chapters on dialogue, character, branching, and collaboration.

Toiya Kristen Finley — Inclusive Game Writing A practical guide to writing diverse and representative characters without tokenization. Indispensable for any writer building a game with characters outside their own experience.

Chris Bateman — Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames (2nd edition, 2022) A fuller, more recent treatment. Covers player-character design, dialogue systems, companion writing, and has substantial chapters on interactive narrative structure.

Anna Anthropy & Naomi Clark — A Game Design Vocabulary Not strictly about writing, but Chapter 6 (on context) and Chapter 7 (on world) speak directly to how narrative and systems interact. Short, readable, analytically sharp.

Books on Writing Generally (Transferable)

Stephen King — On Writing King's memoir-and-manual is mandatory reading for any writer. The craft advice — kill your darlings, read omnivorously, write daily — transfers fully to game writing. Shorter than most writing books and much more fun.

Robert McKee — Story McKee's screenwriting manual. Long, dense, and opinionated. The chapter on dialogue alone is worth the cost. Game writers disagree with McKee on specifics but no one denies his framework.

William Zinsser — On Writing Well Nonfiction-focused but the compression discipline transfers perfectly to game dialogue. Zinsser's rule — "cut every unnecessary word" — is exactly what game writing requires.

Lajos Egri — The Art of Dramatic Writing The foundational text on character-driven dramatic structure. Egri's theory of "premise" and "character dimension" directly informs how you build companions with wound + worldview + voice.

Specific Postmortems and Dev Talks

Greg Kasavin — Hades postmortem talks (GDC, YouTube) Kasavin has given multiple detailed talks on Hades's writing. Prioritize his "Hades: Creating the World" GDC talk and his Supergiant YouTube uploads discussing the Early Access feedback cycle. Essential reading if you are working on any systems-heavy narrative game.

Susan O'Connor — BioShock and Tomb Raider reboot writer on her craft O'Connor has spoken and written extensively on bark writing and dialogue compression. Search GDC Vault and her personal website.

Mac Walters — Mass Effect 2 / Andromeda lead writer on BioWare's process Walters's various interviews and GDC appearances discuss the dialogue wheel's design, the companion-writing process, and the Suicide Mission's integration. Useful contrast with the Andromeda experience.

Robert Humphrey — AI + dialogue tech talks Humphrey has given talks (AI Summit, GDC) on bark scheduling, priority systems, and procedural dialogue. Technical but accessible for designers working at the intersection of writing and systems.

Rhianna Pratchett — Tomb Raider reboot, Mirror's Edge lead writer Pratchett's talks on writing Lara Croft (both for the reboot and historically) offer insight into character-voice development in franchise games. Her IGDA writing SIG chair work is also worth following.

Obsidian Writing Team — multiple GDCs Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas, Tyranny, and the Outer Worlds had distinct writing teams at Obsidian. Their talks on companion-writing, faction dialogue, and choice-consequence design are some of the best publicly available material.

Online Resources

The Writer's Guild of America's Video Game Writing Committee Industry standards, pay rates, and a growing library of craft pieces. WGA membership is not required to read their public materials.

gamewriting.net and similar community sites Aggregators for game-writing craft articles. Quality varies; the top ~20% is excellent.

Pat Holleman — The Narrative Design Podcast Interviews with working game writers. Specifically recommended episodes: Greg Kasavin (on Hades), Chris Avellone (on Planescape), Leigh Alexander (on criticism and craft).

Anna Kipnis — Double Fine writer, long-time blogger Kipnis's writing on the craft of interactive narrative is consistently thoughtful. Find her GDC talks and personal blog entries.

Rob Lockhart — Reign of Giants designer, indie-narrative writing Lockhart writes practically about narrative design for small teams. Useful contrast with the AAA perspective of most other voices here.

Specific Video Essays & YouTube Channels

Mark Brown — Game Maker's Toolkit GMT's episodes on character writing and dialogue systems include: - "The Unique Challenge of Game Writing" - "How Games Convey Information" - "The Art of Video Game Dialogue" (if released by the time you are reading this; GMT's coverage of narrative is expanding)

Razbuten — constraint-based playthroughs that reveal dialogue design Razbuten's "Can You Beat..." series periodically reveals what's actually essential vs. skippable in game dialogue — useful for understanding writing-versus-filler distinctions.

Snoman Gaming Long-form analysis videos on specific games' writing. His Mass Effect retrospectives and Disco Elysium analyses are particularly strong.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais Hour-plus video essays on specific games. His Disco Elysium essay is essential. His BioWare-series retrospectives cover the dialogue wheel's evolution across Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age.

Games to Play and Study

Disco Elysium (2019) — The dialogue-as-skill-check masterwork. Play it twice; take notes on which skill checks produced which lines and how your detective's voice changed.

Mass Effect 2 (2010) — See Case Study 21.1. Play in the Legendary Edition with the dialogue and combat improvements.

Hades (2020) — See Case Study 21.2. Play it twice.

Oxenfree (2016) — Dialogue as real-time mechanic. Short (4-5 hours). Play it in a single sitting.

The Last of Us Part I (2013; remake 2022) — Ellie and Joel's companion writing. Play on Normal difficulty; pay attention to bark cadence and environmental dialogue.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) — Arthur Morgan's voiced protagonist and the camp's ambient dialogue system. Take your time; walk through camp listening.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) — Geralt as voiced protagonist with defined voice. Play the main quest plus Hearts of Stone.

Undertale (2015) — Reactive dialogue as architectural backbone. Play twice: pacifist and genocide routes.

Planescape: Torment (1999; Enhanced Edition 2017) — The deepest branching-tree conversations in games. Older UI, but the writing remains the gold standard.

Night in the Woods (2017) — Dialogue-heavy narrative game where conversations are the primary verb. Small-town life as drama.

Life is Strange (2015) — Choice-consequence dialogue with a rewind mechanic. Interesting structural experiment.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017) and Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) — Contemporary CRPGs with ambitious dialogue systems and voice acting.

Stardew Valley (2016) — Hub-and-spoke small-town relationship building. ConcernedApe's solo-developer achievement in character writing is instructive.

80 Days (2014) — Inkle's branching narrative work. Read the dialogue carefully; Inkle's tools (Ink, open-sourced) are worth learning after you have built your own system.

Tools to Explore

Ink (Inkle) — An open-source scripting language for branching narratives. Used in 80 Days, Heaven's Vault, Neo Cab, others. Free. Well-documented. Integrates with Unity and Unreal. Consider this as an upgrade path when your chapter-21 dialogue system outgrows a pure GDScript implementation.

Yarn Spinner — Another open-source narrative scripting tool. Used in Night in the Woods originally, now broadly adopted. Heavily Unity-focused but Godot ports exist.

ChatMapper — A commercial tool for authoring dialogue trees visually. Used professionally by many teams.

Twine — HTML-based branching fiction authoring. Not a game-engine integration, but useful for prototyping dialogue trees before building them in code.

articy:draft — Professional-grade narrative and dialogue authoring. Expensive, but used by AAA studios. Consider once your game's narrative is too big for hand-coded dictionaries.

Academic & Critical

Emily Short — "Choice of Games" essays on interactive narrative Short (the interactive fiction author, prolific essayist) has written deeply on the craft of branching and reactive narrative. Her essays on "quality-based narrative" and dynamic state systems extend what this chapter introduces.

Nick Montfort — Twisty Little Passages An academic history of interactive fiction, covering the origins of branching narrative. Context for why the systems we use today look the way they do.

Jonne Arjoranta — Real-Time Hermeneutics Academic treatment of how players interpret game dialogue in real time. For the designer who wants theoretical vocabulary.

Clara Fernández-Vara — Introduction to Game Analysis Tools for analyzing games as cultural texts. The chapters on character and dialogue will deepen your ability to critique and learn from others' work.

Where to Go Next

After this chapter, you have implemented a working dialogue system and written three NPCs for your game. You have one chapter remaining in Part V.

Chapter 22 is about environmental storytelling — the narrative that exists in spaces rather than in words. It will complement this chapter beautifully: dialogue tells the player what characters say; environmental storytelling tells them what the world is. Together, they form a complete narrative toolkit for interactive media.

Prepare by playing through one region of Dark Souls (or Elden Ring if you have not played a FromSoftware game), specifically attending to environmental detail. Count the corpses with meaningful placement. Note where items lie. Observe how rooms tell stories without a single voiced word.

Then turn the page.