James Patterson, mystery novelist/televisionist/filmist/Readers-Digestist, is rich. Crazy rich. The man’s writing makes so much money that my brain starts bleeding when I try to envision the raw numbers turned into cash. I can’t say much about his work - I’m just not much of a mystery guy. My only experience with Patterson’s output is restricted to films starring Ashley Judd and even those I can only hazily recall (much as it is with all movies watched on TNT at 2am.) Recently, Patterson set his sights on the rich narrative soil of videogames and is already enjoying a modicum of success with his PC title Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet, a game based on the popular novel/television franchise. He certainly seems to have a keen sense of the form’s potential. In an interview with Next-Gen, Patterson said, "There's all sorts of content for games. To me, games are most interesting as they break the rules. The casual games business is just starting to open up. I'm not big on imitations. I like it when it's fresh and wide. It's a blank screen, man, you can put anything on it." Laudable attitudes about gaming aside, though, I’m always hesitant to embrace a prose writer’s jump to writing games.
As I mentioned earlier, good writing is scarce in games, so you’d think that an accomplished prose writer would be a boon in a title’s development. But, as I also mentioned, the linearity of long and short form fiction isn’t particularly well-suited to a medium that requires variability; a reader will get to the end of the story no matter what but a player has to have control of how they get there.
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