Chris Bateman announced the release of his new book Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames.
This is a book about how we currently get stories into games. Anyone interested in learning these skills would do well to pick up a copy.
Bateman’s blog posts on game design are thought-provoking, such as Non-verbal Communication and Toru Iwatani’s Escalator, so I imagine this book will also be of high quality.
While I think that narrative shouldn’t be the sole focus of games to the exclusion of, you know, gameplay, it is still painful to play games with horrible dialogue and a joy to play those that are written well. Developers who want to avoid causing the pain might want to look into this book.