This Week's Featured Interview ...
Marianne Krawczyk
Game Writer, Sony
by Jeannie Novak
Founder & Lead Writer

SANTA MONICA, CA -- After writing professionally for the last few years, Marianne Krawczyk got her break when her first feature, Popular Myth, was optioned. Moving
on to the hit children’s show, Sweet Valley High, Marianne learned the ins and outs of the writers’ room. She was then hired to write and develop the animated project, Swamp & Tad, for Wild Brain Studios—and she also wrote Caffeine, a pilot for Studios USA/Universal Television. Transferring her skills to the game industry, Marianne wrote the story and script for the Sony PlayStation 2 AAA title, God of War—and she recently was hired to write for unannounced game projects with Sony and Midway. Marianne also has projects under consideration at National Geographic Film and Television and United Artists Pictures.

According to Marianne, good writing is always challenging: "You need interesting twists, truthful characters that drive stories, and compelling worlds. If writing were easy, every film would be a blockbuster, every TV show a hit, every game a 500,000-unit seller." Obviously, this isn’t the case. Introducing game design into how stories are told is a whole new challenge. To further complicate matters, good stories are linear while games are not. A common mistake is to start out with something too complicated that will only get more so throughout the ever-changing organism that is a game. Negotiating a simple, direct story in a world that is designed to drift sideways is difficult—but, ironically, it’s probably a better metaphor for life itself than the medium of film.