When you’re a game writer, you put your heart and soul into your work. You can’t help it. You love storytelling; it’s why you picked this career. So those moments when you somehow break through, and write something you’re really proud of…a character that feels real, a plot twist you didn’t see coming, a tender moment…there’s nothing better.
And then you put that work in front of your designer.
(If you’re a working writer reading this, you’re already tensing up, I bet. You know what’s about to happen.)
What you WANT to hear from your designer: "This scene broke my heart!"
What they say instead: "Playtesters said this dragged."
What you want to hear: “This moment between these two characters feels so real!”
What they say instead: "We're cutting it. Pacing feels off."
What you want: “Players are going to freak out when they get to this point of the story. It's so great!”
What happens instead: Surprise! Twenty minutes of combat you didn't write, followed by your two minutes of dialogue, followed by a puzzle that might take five minutes or five hours depending on the player.
Feel familiar? It does to me! I’ve had these conversations/moments with designers so many times over the years, I’ve lost track.
If you've worked in games for longer than ten minutes, you know what I’m talking about. Your story gets squished, stretched, interrupted, or cut—and when you try to explain that hey, the pacing really matters, design often shrugs and asks you to "make it shorter" or "add more tension.”
For many years, I assumed that I just needed to write better material. "Once they see how great the script is, they won’t dream of changing it!"
But even Shakespeare himself can’t overcome the fundamental problem, which is that pacing is out of the writer’s hands.
Younger me: WHY???
Oldera me: Because in the world of video games, writers are specialists.
Here’s what I mean.
Designers are juggling combat duration, puzzle difficulty, traversal mechanics, progression systems—and your dialogue is one piece in that massive system. When things don't fit, designers optimize for the player experience as they see it, not for your narrative arc. And guess who gets asked to adapt?
And honestly, designers aren’t wrong!
You’re a game writer, but you’re a game player, too. When you play games, you want agency and freedom and all the good things that games can give us. Right? Me too. We want to control the action – and that can mean that, as players, we inevitably shape the pacing.
It feels like magic when you’re the player; when you’re the writer, it can feel like a nightmare.
The real problem isn't that you've lost control of the pacing (you never had that control; sorry). It's that you don't speak the same language as your designers. They see systems and mechanics; You see story and character. You're both focused on the player experience, but you're approaching it from completely different angles. And without a way to talk to each other - to “speak designer” - your best ideas are going to die in your documents.
I know all about this, unfortunately. In my 15+ years working in games, I never fully cracked this nut. Yes, I figured out ways to survive the writer/designer relationship, to negotiate and compromise, but I never really found a way to work WITH designers in a way that made both the story and the design stronger. (And I’ve worked on multiple best-selling, award-winning games!)
Now that I’ve been running The Narrative Department for over five years, and working with hundreds of writers, I now see that that gap—that fundamental inability for writers and designers to communicate—is probably the #1 thing holding back most game writers' careers.
And more and more, studios are looking for writers who understand design. In a chaotic, upside-down industry where narrative teams are often the first to get cut, being "more than just the writer" isn't a nice-to-have. It takes you from “expendable” to “essential.”
The good news is that we don’t need to turn ourselves into designers. We just need to learn how to speak the language. That means finding a designer who can explain design thinking in a way writers can actually understand and use.
Enter Will Shen.
Will is a lead designer at Unknown Worlds Entertainment (Subnautica) and a former Design Director at Bethesda Game Studios (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starfield). But what makes him special isn't just his resume—it's that he can bridge the gap between design and narrative in a way that makes sense to both sides. When Will talks about pacing, he's not dismissing story. He's showing you how designers think about the player experience, and how your writing fits into that picture.
He's put together a free lesson, sharing some insights on how to tackle this universal problem, and how to better understand where your designer is coming from. You can watch it here.
"Once you realize that you're not in control of the pacing, and that the time it takes a player to get through your writing sits alongside the time it takes to get through the game, we can begin to craft stories, dialogue, and text that support the game's design."
This is where Will can save our bacon - by showing us HOW to write in a way that supports the game’s design, getting into the practical nuts and bolts about:
- How designers approach player agency
- How they structure tutorials - and whether story has a role there or not
- How they think about progression and difficulty curves (this is a black box for many game writers)
- How they balance player freedom with narrative momentum (DO they?)
Every one of these is a place where writers and designers clash—or could collaborate —depending on whether we speak the same language.
Want to learn some practical techniques you can use in your next design meeting?
I'm hosting a 90-minute workshop on January 24th: How to Pitch Story Ideas So Designers Actually Listen. Will will be joining us (via recording), and you'll walk away with a framework you can use immediately—next pitch, next documentation handoff, next time you need to get a designer to say Yes.
Susan O'Connor is an award-winning game writer with credits on BioShock, Far Cry, and Tomb Raider. Her projects have sold over 30 million copies and generated more than $500 million in sales. She founded The Narrative Department to help writers learn the ins and outs of writing for games - skills that everyone assumes you somehow already know.