A game writer won the Campbell

 Posted by (Visited 4552 times)  Game talk, Reading
Sep 032007
 

Alas, she won it for writing a novel, not for a game.

This is nice news for the gaming industry because Naomi Novik is a former game designer — she worked on Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.

So now the question is when a writer will win it for a game, instead of a book (no matter how great the books are).

  7 Responses to “A game writer won the Campbell”

  1. Wagner James Au says:
    September 3, 2007 at 7:29 pm

    Hits keep coming; last year she optioned her books to Peter Jackson:

  2. Raph says:
    September 3, 2007 at 8:20 pm

    Yes; she also won the Compton Crook and the Locus Award for best new writer.

  3. Jeff Freeman says:
    September 4, 2007 at 12:12 am

    So now the question is when a writer will win it for a game

    I dread it. There’s already a powerful sense among the jaded that MMO’s (at least) would be far better games if game designers didn’t make them.

    My snarky come-back to that has generally been, “Yeah, and maybe novels would be better if writers didn’t write them! Perhaps we should swap jobs.”

    Well… thanks a freakin’ lot Naomi Novik, for ruining a perfectly good come-back.

    Now I’ve got nothin’.

  4. David Moles says:
    September 4, 2007 at 1:44 am

    Well, technically it could be her game writing that got her the votes… 🙂

    But — speaking as a Campbell loser myself 🙂 — the Campbell is almost always the “most popular first novel” award. You get the occasional rare exception like Jay Lake, but in terms of sheer short story output Jay’s in a class by himself — and also in a class by himself in terms of gift for self-marketing and his splashy debut on the convention-going scene.

    It doesn’t actually take that many votes to win the Campbell. I’d say a game writer will win when there’s an eligible game writer who’s got sufficient name recognition and enough fans to remind people that s/he *is* eligible.

    The eligibility criteria are basically the same as the SFWA eligibility criteria. “One professionally produced full length dramatic script, with credits acceptable to the Membership Committee” might or might be read to include games; I suspect that if a game writer got a fat stack of nominations they’d be inclined to read the rule loosely.

    As for name recognition… well, the fact that no screenwriter’s won yet might tell you something. I consider myself the kind of gamer who plays for the story, but I still couldn’t tell you who wrote any of the games I’ve played in the last ten or twenty years. As long as they’re not featured prominently on the box, and as long as the marquee games are written by teams, I don’t see it happening soon. I mean, I know one of the guys working on Mass Effect, but no matter how much I end up enjoying the game, I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable nominating him for a Campbell when I don’t know how much of it was written by who. He’s a lot more likely to get on the ballot if he sells a novel and it gets popular.

  5. Science Fiction Awards Watch » Blog Archive » Continued Hugo Linkage says:
    September 4, 2007 at 11:46 am

    […] Koster notes that Naomi Novik wrote for roleplaying games before she hit the big time with that cute […]

  6. Jeff Freeman says:
    September 4, 2007 at 11:20 pm

    the Campbell is almost always the “most popular first novel” award

    Almost? I thought that was the Campbell? (but without the implication there’s anything wrong with that).

    As for game-writers…

    Whole lots of game’s plots really are team-written.

    Novelists tend to run off and wood-shed, come back with a novel (after fighting all sorts of horrors). At least, that’s my understanding based on numerous Stephen King novels about writers and horrors.

    But game designers… not so much. If there’s a plot in the game and it’s the same one at the end of the project as it was at the beginning, then it’s probably a game based on a book, really. Otherwise, you start with a plot and maybe not even the whole thing “nailed down”, and it gets digested and transformed by “it would be cool if this also” and “it would be better if this instead” and “wouldn’t it be just as cool and whole lots cheaper for the surprise ending to be” and “hey everybody, we’re out of money” and so on.

    ‘Really not fair to credit the final product’s writing to any one person… though it’s not especially rare for the entire product to be credited to one person, anyway, despite that being even more ridiculous.

    What we need are cooler team names, like rock n roll bands.

    Heck, even family-band Christian folk groups have cooler names than the ones we give game studios.

  7. David Moles says:
    September 5, 2007 at 2:27 am

    Almost? I thought that was the Campbell?

    No, it’s “best new writer”. Which very occasionally goes to somebody with no novels at all.

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