Read Bruno's article about games industry standardization
Bruno recently wrote an article about standardization in the games industry - and why it will probably never reach the levels that the film industry has in the US. The US film industry is extremely standardized and unionized and can be this way because the actual assets involved in shooting film are usually possible to standardize.
Games, as Bruno points out, are fundamentally unable to standardize their assets, processes, or workflows to anywhere near the same degree. Attempts to do so are often inauthentic. Agile has been something we've been talking about a lot over the last few months - it's often implemented in wildly different ways on each project, and almost every version of it I've seen is fundamentally not Agile.
Bruno mentioned something very familiar to a lot of narrative workers: we specifically as narrative people are motivated to erode role and task standardization in the industry for our own benefit. Today, you'll see a lot of narrative designers who are, fundamentally, just doing the exact same work that writers did 10 years ago - the same kinds of implementation work, branching conversation design, and so on. But now we call a lot of those people narrative designers, because that's a higher-status title that draws more attention to the technical aspects of the job. Because of the varied design and technical verbs contained within it, the narrative designer title is an umbrella which covers a very wide variety of workers who all possess completely different skill sets (and who all debate what the job title means all the time).
But large corporations do try to standardize roles to the greatest extent they can within games. For a period of time at Riot I was involved in writing the job seniority definitions for writers and editors. The ranks were defined using descriptions of skills, rather than duties, so that they could apply to a range of different products. We spent a long time learning to think of the job in terms of skills rather than duties. This is a duty:
Turns in a new draft every Friday.
This is a skill (or a "competency"):
Executes assigned work at an expected quality level within given constraints.
This kind of language attempts to standardize the expectations for a job tier across a company. But the language itself is also subject to these language-standardizing rules. The standards were so strict because role ambiguity is so unacceptable for a large company. When you start trying to figure out salary tiers for like 50 people, you need some rubric on hand for why X person should be a mid and Y person should be a senior. It's only fair - but it's also the only way to run a gigantic organization. I realized during this process that this kind of standardization is what makes it possible to be a megacorp in the first place.
While I doing this work at Riot, there was no narrative design department yet. But at the exact time I was working on the definitions for writers and editors, there were a lot of arguments on Twitter about how to distinguish between a narrative designer who can do systems design, economy design, or technical/coding work, and a narrative designer who is doing the same work a writer would have done 10 years ago (mostly writing, with a side of relevant design labor like conversation design, some quest scripting, etc). It was quite easy to find people taking really hard stances one way or the other on this stuff. I have no idea why everyone started arguing about it at that time - the term had been common for a few years already - but maybe something was in the water and everyone just wanted to fight.
It was pretty clear to me already, from personal experience with ND work, but not the title, that earning the title ND allowed you do a wider variety of work at your studio. Writers are often extremely fenced-in on games teams; their roles are often highly politicized. The title itself earns you heat. and here I was, working on the team that was putting standardizing fences and gates around the definition of writer and editor at my own studio.
There was no way to avoid the standardization, so the best I could do was participate and make sure the results were good. But it was pretty easy to compare the rules we had to give ourselves to the relative freedom of NDs. Because the title was vague, you could define it within your studio. But the biggest plus was that the ambiguity of the ND title fit the work.
Games narrative work is one of the most impossibly ambiguous and un-standardizable types of work in the industry. Narrative is implemented through design and art and text and audio, and requires some knowledge of each of these areas. Narrative can even be implemented as an economy of resources - see Bruno's own Fallen London. But the amount and type of knowledge or expertise narrative must have in each of these areas is different on each game!
If we want to take advantage of this broad horizon, then the fewer assumptions people have about our skills, the better (for us). We need the freedom to learn new ones all the time - even if it makes it harder to describe us, or to wedge us into a corporate pay band.
So those big companies with those pay bands and job rank definitions do try to standardize the definition of Narrative Designer in ways that narrative workers may someday come to find unpleasant. It's an unavoidable clash, I think. Not even all their reasons for standardization are bad. These huge corporations need standardization to control their costs... but also so that they can submit data to the government and prove that they are paying people equitably. Ambiguity makes it hard to be a big company in a hundred different ways. Standardization practically creates the corporation.
So they're going to gradually develop their own terminology and rules about this narrative designer identity. Someday we may come to find that each company has its own incredibly specific corner of narrative design staked out as true narrative design, with small fiddly differences in each place. Tiny differences in job titles and sub-discipline structures may become ossified in different megacorps or even in different regions and languages. Maybe then we will all get annoyed enough that the language will shift again.
I have done narrative design work, but I've also experienced the benefits of job ambiguity in a different part of the narrative department. I spent a long time on Riot Forge doing both editing and writing - close to an equal amount of each for several years in a row. I loved being in a position where I could use any skill I possessed to make the game ship, and I loved being on a team where nobody was going to stop me. There weren't inter-discipline hostilities to get in my way. Near the end of my time there, my job title was eventually changed from editor to writer to acknowledge that I had been spending all day writing, actually, and that's the sexy job title, so I wanted it... but I was still also editing sometimes, too.
If only I'd had a job title that could have captured that particular role ambiguity! I wasn't doing any design in that particular role, so I couldn't honestly claim the ND title. Maybe I need to craft a new type of ambiguity for myself and all the other writers who also edit, and editors who also write. Maybe we need to get together and convince the universities to talk us up a bit, like they did narrative designers...