This afternoon Variety released the list of nominees for the new award at this year’s inaugural WGA awards — videogame writing. Winners will be announced February 9th, but due to the WGA strike the LA show has pulled the plug. The east coast show at the Broadway Millennium in New York is still on track.

The nominees are as follows:

* “Crash of the Titans,” written by Christopher Mitchell for Sierra Entertainment
* “Dead Head Fred,” written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan for D3 Publisher
* “The Simpsons Game,” with lead writer Matt Selman, written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, dialogue by Jeff Poliquin for Electronic Arts
* “The Witcher,” with lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, dialogue by Sebastian Stepien, additional dialogue by Marcin Blacha and writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole for Atari
* “World in Conflict,” story design by Christofer Emgard, story consultant Larry Bond and script consultant Ed Zuckerman for Sierra Entertainment.

I was stoked when I first heard of the WGA rewarding videogame writers for their hard work. I feel that this will provide an incentive for studios to go out in search of real writers, instead of just grabbing the one producer who can string a few words together to crank out a mediocre script.

However, this is a fairly disappointing list. I’m not going to name names, but I personally only feel that one or two of those titles deserve to even be nominated. Crash Bandicoot deserves a reward for best game writing? Give me a break.

Upon inspection of Variety’s write up, requirements for nomination are as follows:

To be eligible, videogames must have been released between Dec. 1, 2006, and Nov. 30, 2007, but they were not required to be produced under WGA jurisdiction.

Writers of source material were not eligible, and the credited writers must have been or applied to become members of the WGA’s New Media Caucus.

BioShock and Portal both were released before November 30th and were both genius! They were both among the most completely concise and well thought out games in a long time. Erik Wolpaw (Portal) and Amy Hennig (BioShock) deserve their dues, so here I am, sticking up for them because in 2007 they collectively pushed the game industry forward when it comes to storytelling.

I’m still begrudgingly proud of the WGA for embracing the games industry, I just don’t understand how they came to the conclusions that they did. Here’s to hoping for next year.

Source: Variety

Tags: matt_selman

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