I think it’s by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done as a writer, but also one of the most rewarding. Gary: It’s a massively complicated and exhausting undertaking. JB: In the same breath of gaming, when moving into Story Consultant roles (like with The Walking Dead games), what’s the process like here? In short, how exactly do you execute a story / script / storyboard for a video game? We’re still only just starting to really figure out how to give the player true agency, but as we get better at doing that, at allowing the audience to really assume the role of protagonist in a story and to influence that story with the choices and actions they take, I think we’re going to see the emergence of a really exciting new way to tell stories, one that might make the stories we’re used to being told in film and television, where the audience is just a passive viewer and not a participant, to seem quite primitive by comparison. We’ve come a long way from “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle!” You only need to look at games like Mass Effect, Journey, The Last of Us, and Telltale’s adaptation of The Walking Dead – which I had some involvement with as a consultant and writer – to see just how great the opportunities to tell stories in an interactive format are right now, and yet we’re still pretty much in the silent-movie era in terms of the medium’s overall evolution. Video games have matured immensely as an art form in the past several years, and a big part of that has stemmed from a desire – and, really, a need – to tell better stories, to try to catch up with film and television and the other major narrative forms as a real medium in which to tell compelling and emotionally engaging stories. Gary: Yeah, growing up my two big loves were movies and video games, so I’ve been really fortunate to have been able to pursue both of those passions professionally, in two separate careers that have now to some extent intertwined. Obviously, you had a passion for this lane, but did you find it to be a good medium for storytelling?

From journalism contributions to heading up entire publications I point to PC Gamer here. I had the pleasure to go back and forth with master screenwriter (yeah, he’s covered the gamut) Gary Whitta about his roots in video games, his shift to writing for the screen and, now, his third pivot to the novel.

Abomination by Gary Whitta