A little over a week ago, I joined some friends in watching the Nebula Awards online. We talked about who we hoped would win, or who we thought would win, and when it came to the Game Writing Nebula, a couple people confessed they really had no idea since they don't play games.
If you read my blog at all, I'm a huge gamer, so I've always followed the Game Writing Nebula, and it's a relatively new category, so it's interesting seeing it evolve. The very first award in 2019 was dominated by what we might call Choose Your Own Adventure after the children's book series (with the odd God of War thrown in).
While interactive fiction is a game in the sense that you do interact with it, I have trouble calling it a game. Since I grew up reading a lot of CYOA books, even those with stat blocks and combat like the Lone Wolf series, I tend to consider them "books" and not "games." Where was Lone Wolf shelved? In the middle grade/YA section of the bookstore, and not with the Dungeons & Dragons game material. But I can see a case for interactive fiction being a game, even if it's not what commonly comes to mind when you think of one.
The Game Writing Nebula has expanded since then though. In 2020, half the nominees were from video games, and the first instance of tabletop gaming cropped up with the Fate Accessibility Toolkit from Evil Hat Productions, bringing us to the three types of game writing honored by the Nebulas: interactive fiction, tabletop game writing, and video game writing.
And it just seems weird to me that all of them are honored in the same game category when they require different skill sets, just as novels and short stories do. A tabletop game writer is also part game designer. Even if they're not laying down stat blocks, they're working to instruct either a player or a game master in how to tell the story, how to play a character, what the game world does or could look like, etc. It's definitely game writing, and it's creative, but parts of any given game book are going to be written as non-fiction. Possibly most of it. A few game books might hint at a story here or there for flavor, but it's not most of the content.
Interactive fiction and video game writing on the other hand are trying to tell a story, but interactive fiction is heavily based on conventional prose and video game writing usually comes out in the from of dialogue with animated characters acting out the story. Because of this, the latter is typically more collaborative with the artists and animators, and key moments of the story could be just a line in the script but a beautifully rendered cutscene for the player. It's kind of like the difference between writing prose and writing a screenplay. Two related, but different skillsets.
I realize there probably aren't enough game writers or enough will to split up the game writing category into three separate awards, but when Thirsty Sword Lesbians, a tabletop game, won this year, I couldn't help wondering: how can you really compare it against Wildermyth, a video game where you follow a group of characters over time? You might like one more than the other, but in no other award would you pit a tabletop game versus a video game. Their audiences might overlap, but they're very different mediums.
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