You've got a great game in development — it deserves a great story to match!

The question is, how do you get there?

• The right way: hire a pro writer with extensive experience in games, as early in your process as possible.

• The risky way: hire a pro writer with no experience in games.

• The wrong way: don't hire a writer.

It's amazing how often that last option gets chosen! Despite an ever-increasing understanding that strong storytelling can improve most games' quality and success, most narrative content for video games is still written by game designers, whose expertise in this area can range from outstanding at best to . . . well, much less than outstanding.

It's not their fault. Most game designers simply have no training in how to effectively plan, write, revise or execute a game story. But the result when the average designer attempts to deliver professional-level storytelling is often disappointing.

Conversely, hiring a "big name" Hollywood writer for your game — someone who doesn't play games, who has never been on a game development team — can be a recipe for a different kind of narrative disaster, and probably a much more costly one. It raises the strong possibility of a stark and damaging disconnect between the work of a traditional writer who's used to having complete control of his characters and story, and a dynamic game design that strives for providing player freedom and abiity to affect outcomes. Sadly, the dev team will most likely end up throwing out much of this writer's (often expensive) work, because it doesn't serve the gameplay.

The ideal solution is to hire a professional writer who actually knows games. Finding a writer who plays a lot of games is a good start, but finding one who has been in the trenches — through many game project cycles, with varied genres on multiple platforms — is a much wiser choice.

A writer such as this will understand that game stories are unlike those of any other medium —  that they must seamlessly mesh with and support the existing game mechanics, not ignore or contradict them. Such a writer will realize and accept that gameplay comes first, and will know how to use narrative to contextualize, enhance and deepen the player's experience. And on a more practical level, a game writer with varied game development experience will hit the ground running, speaking the same language as your team and requiring much less initial orientation or later redirection.

In short, you don't want a writer who only thinks like a writer. You want a writer who can also think like a game developer.