Gears of War 2 at the New York Comic Con

Of Marcus, 20 Psychologists, the Sacred Word and a Poor Writer Bitch
4/24/2008 2:08 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 2

It's rare that the journos at videogame events are outnumbered by ardent game fans, but such was the case on Sunday at the New York Comic Convention when an enthusiastic crowd of Gears of War fans packed a large meeting room at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Manhattan's waterfront. Many, like me, had already read the enlightening "Game Informer" cover story on Gears of War 2, so, did it make sense to be there? Would Epic Games say anything new -- anything at all? I didn't have much hope when they showed the same short, bloody-red trailer that most of us had already seen.

I could dwell on the fact that Epic Games president Mike Capps only half-jokingly stated that money was the most important part of making games. Money's a fact of life, and you can't begrudge the head of a company his ducats. I could dwell on the fact that few new things were talked about beyond the magazine article, but that holding back is marketing and PR-oriented: Leave 'em hungry and they'll come back for more.

The primary topic of discussion was the matter of writing for the game. To many, the script was the weakest piece of the generally brilliant Gears of War puzzle. While Capps acknowledged that the writing was lacking, he also shone a bright light on the process of scripting a mega-game that's so hotly anticipated. Once again half-jokingly, Capps exuberantly called Joshua Ortega "our poor writer bitch" who has to deal with the changing whims of the designers all the time, at which point Ortega sheepishly grinned.

What would you do if your boss called you a bitch before 500 people? I'll tell you what I'd do. While I yearn to please anyone who hires my gun, frankly, I don't care how much money anyone would be willing pay me for writing -- if anyone ever had the audacity to call me their "writer bitch," I would walk out the door and probably spit in someone's smug face. In the beginning, there was the word and the word was sacred, and it still is. I would have said, "Dude, my first book got me well into the six figures because I can write better than the average pencil-necked geek. So forget your fancy, fabulous (insert alliterative expletive) Cliffy B bits and bytes, for even though he's a fellow Pole, I'm outta here if you don't completely respect what I do." But that's just me. Ortega, whom Microsoft provided to Epic for free, kept grinning.

And yet, as Capps explained the writing process when it comes to games, I began to more fully understand and appreciate the rabbit hole from whence he emerged. To him (and to many game makers), it's the artwork and control mechanics (and making money) that are uppermost in designers' minds when they make a game. In fact, according to Capps, Epic employed about 20 psychologists to observe the habits of 30 new user testers each night as they played during the GoW2 game-making process. Imagine the research, the placing of electrodes, the watching of pupils getting bigger and smaller. It's a game in itself! I thought, how cool was that? They've put up maybe $20 million to make a game, and they'll do anything to make sure gamers will like it, including adding the science of medicine and the mind to help.