Promoting forum-frequents to commmunity managers to writers at BioWare. What do you think of this?

Re: Jay

That explains a lot actually. But yeah, there is precedent for fans being hired for things, hell there's even a trope for it. But for video games, most examples I was aware were more tech-oriented (i.e. mods and mod makers being bought/hired by the company and developing professionally). Valve has done that quite a bit in the past. No reason it can't happen for writers or more artistic people either but you don't go and dump core parts of the project on them right away.

FraQ the general consensus is that you are already in space or at least from it.

I'm also already in space, as you can tell.

I don't care. If the people at Bioware think they're qualified for the position, that's good enough for me. If they wind up being great, then there's no issues; if they wind up being awful, well, what were you expecting for someone hired through a fan forum?

I see no problem with it as long as the person has skills that will add to the game/s. It's better that they show they familiar with the game's storylines and characters.

At least a fan would be more mindful of the continuity of the story. I wouldn't want to see a newbie handle already established characters, many of them are already really well done, but a new set of eyes could help the story along...I guess.

I've never played that, so I'll take your word for it. I'm here because of DA. 

I can see how writing for a company has it's advantages, but I also know that to be a proper writer you have to be able to dedicate a lot of your time to it, so you have to be 'set up' for it. Same with any other occupation that takes creativity. Interest alone won't make you a good writer, there are many determining factors. Skill, time, materials at your disposal...It's a tough thing to get into. But if the boards can produce a fan who has that, I see no problem with it. As a game player I'm more interested in a good game, with a good story, than I am worried about where they aquired the people they have working on the game...for the most part, anyway. 

What I'd like to know - perhaps there are people here who can say something about it - is whether screenwriting is more difficult than writing prose. I'm curious about this since IMO Bioware's writing changed drastically when they started making "cinematic" games and moved away from the more "bookish" approach to dialogue most rpgs had taken until then. Their writing gained emotional intensity, but lost detail and logical cohesion. The net effect was not at all to my liking, since I value detail and logical cohesion much higher than emotional intensity.

Personally, after a few excursions into fanfic I feel confident that I could write a reasonably good novel, with the help of some friends for feedback and a good editor. I mainly lack the necessary discipline for such a long work at the moment - maybe I'll try after I've retired from regular work. Writing a collection of dialogue scenes for a game that make up a coherent story, however, that seems much more difficult, more difficult now, even, than writing prose appeared before I wrote my first piece of fanfic.

Also with regard to detail vs. drama: are TW3's writers simply better than Bioware's since they managed to make good scenes without compromosing logical cohesion or omit detail, or was it just because CDPR had a much bigger budget?