writers-guild-of-america posts

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, the third game in Ubisoft's action game series, won the 2011 Videogame Writing award from the Writer's Guild of America. The winner was revealed during ceremonies on Saturday night where the game won against titles like Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands and Singularity.

There's been some debate about how the guild selects the nominees and winners. In a recent editorial at Gamesindustry.biz (free registration required) the WGA's Micah Wright describes how the guild does require that all game entries join the guild's Videogame Writers Caucus which has a $60 a year fee.

Meanwhile PC owners are still waiting official word from Ubisoft about the PC release of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. While some retail web site have shown a February 22 release date that date has yet to be confirmed by Ubisoft.

The Writer's Guild of America has been offering an annual award for the past few years for "outstanding achievement in videogame writing." This year is no exception as the combined East and West versions of the guild (who also honor TV and movie writers) have offered up their nominees for the 2010 edition of the award.

Nominated this year are five games that either have or will come out for the PC: Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands and Singularity (God of War III was the other nominee). The winner will be announced on February 5 in ceremonies held in both Los Angeles and New York. You can check out the full list of nominees and the writers credited with the games after the jump:

It didn't exactly have the most complicated storyline in the world and the characters are one-dimensional but Modern Warfare 2's script actually got nominated for the Writer's Guild of America's annual "outstanding achievement in videogame writing" award. The 2010 installment of the award will be presented on February 20.

Other nominees this year for the award include another Activision published game X-Men Origins Wolverine (written by comic book and TV writer Marc Guggenheim) and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II. The Writer's Guild said the award had over double the number of submissions for this year's award compared to last year.

Writing in games is perhaps given short shrift but last year the Writers Guild of America decided to expand their normal film and TV writing categories to include video games. This year for their second annual video game writing award they have nominated five games, four of which were released on the PC (Star Wars: The Force Unleashed in the sole exception).

Three of the nominees are certainly well know titles; Fallout 3 (writing credited to a huge team including lead writer Emil Pagliarulo and quest writing by Erik J. Caponi, Brian Chapin, Jon Paul Duvall, Kurt Kuhlmann, Alan Nanes, Bruce Nesmith, Fred Zeleny, Nate Ellis, William Killeen, Mark Nelson, and Justin McSweeney); Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 (credited to writer Haris Orkin and Story Producer Mical Pedriana) and Tomb Raider Underworld (Story by Eric Lindstrom and Toby Guard and screenplay Lindstrom)

The fourth PC game nominee is very unusual indeed; a downloadable PC-Mac title called Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. This mix of RPG and stats set in the 1920s is from Mousechief and the Writers Guild have nominated it and its writers (Keith Nemitz. and Adrianne Ambrose) alongside the big mainstream PC productions. Could this game pull off an upset win against all of these high profile titles?