*This piece is based on the writer’s actual work experience, but details regarding the company and characters have been anonymized.

The question I get asked the most often while working as a game scenario writer is, in fact, less of a question than a confirmation.

“So you… write character dialogue and things like that, right?”

When I say yes, people feel relieved. Seeing their relieved faces, I feel relieved too. More precisely, I pretend to be relieved. Because that’s a half-truth, and the other half is that this half conceals the difficulty I face the most in doing this work.

I write dialogue. True. But what I do more often is cut dialogue.

In the scenario work for a project I was once part of, there was a time I had to compress one chapter from thirty pages down to ten. The reason was simple. The release schedule. The protagonist of the chapter, Character T, was a character the company wanted to raise as a central figure of the IP. That person who helped him later returns as the most monstrous villain of his life. T spends his whole life believing this.

‘My life was that man’s joke.’

In the 30-page story, this belief collapses in a single scene near the end. T happens to encounter an old record and learns that his escape was not that villain’s misery.

This scene was the moment when the very interpretation collapsed—how a single human being had spent his whole life interpreting his own survival, as a debt, as a humiliation, as a joke of fate. He comes to realize that all of it—the self-loathing he had carried his whole life, the sense of indebtedness for having survived, his twisted obsession toward that man—had been a house built on a false foundation.

But this scene was cut.

The decision to cut was made in a meeting room right after lunch. Someone said, “It’s too long for the schedule,” and someone else said, “Removing the scene won’t cause any problems for the plot,” and yet another said, “Will users even read all of this?” All three were right. I agreed too.

The work of a scenario writer involves both defending one’s own writing and objectively evaluating one’s own writing at the same time. And those two things must be performed in the same meeting room, with the same mouth, at the same time.

We handled his shift in perception another way. A short flashback cut, a line or two of dialogue, an indirect mention. The information value gets conveyed. The plot rolls along. The user knows the fact that T has learned the truth.

Clearly nothing is missing, and yet something is missing somewhere.

When the compression was finished and the chapter was released, T was still T. Users liked him. Fan art was posted, and he ranked high in character popularity polls. From the company’s standpoint, he’s a successful character. From my standpoint too, it was a job well finished, professionally.

And yet, whenever I think of him, I feel somehow indebted. To put it precisely, the feeling that I’m not sure whether the T who was alive in 30 pages and the T who survived in 10 pages are the same person. The two use the same name and wear the same face, but one is a person who passes through that single scene where the foundation of his life collapses, and the other is a person who was handed that scene as a brief flashback.

Truth arriving as information and truth arriving as an event is different. An event is not something that happens but that is passed through, and while being passed through, it realizes itself by borrowing the body and time of the one who passes through it. Information attaches itself, but an event transforms.

The 30-page T would have been given several days to pass through that truth. He would have denied, raged, collapsed, and risen again. Over those several days, his self-understanding, the direction of his anger, and the very way he recalled his past would have been rearranged. The 10-page T passes through it between two cuts. More precisely, he does not pass through it. He ‘receives’ the truth. The received truth merely attachees itself to him; it cannot transform him.

This is not T’s problem. T is a being made of code and text, and does not experience time.

This is my problem.

I was the one who wanted to give him time to collapse, and I did not give it to him.

This is the hardest part to explain about a game scenario writer’s work. We create characters. We create them but do not own them. We love them. We love them but have no authority to keep them alive. We design their lives. We design them, but the moment that design is released, we no longer have any say over it.

T is my character. He’s my character, but more precisely he’s the company’s IP, and more precisely still he’s the joint product of planning, illustration, direction, and countless other teams, and most precisely of all he belongs to the users who raised him. I decided what words to put in his mouth, but I only decided half of what events would befall him, and whether those events would unfold over several days or between two cuts—that I did not get to decide.

A character is less a vessel than something closer to a knot performed by gathering of many forces. Data, schedules, tables, costs, metrics, and intent. All of these exert their own share of force. The release schedule cuts the scenario, the dubbing costs cut the cutscenes, the reward table determines where the character appears. The writer’s intent is merely one of these forces. Not an equal one. More often than not, a smaller one. The way a character lives once released is therefore not my work, but something that arises at the site where all these forces meet.

From the start, I was not in a position to save him alone. I was just one strand of the knot. That doesn’t make the guilt disappear, though. Because the fact of having been one strand of the knot does not exempt one from ethical responsibility. It only changes the shape of the responsibility.

Before writing this, I read Seyeon Kim’s “Hanyeo, Diver, Young Woman.”¹ It was a piece about the process by which the knowledge of a haenyeo—learned over a lifetime of grappling with the sea through the body—gets translated into the language of the diver within the institution of school. The writer wrote that this translation is not mere preservation but a process of rearranging the very relationship between sea and body. Reading it, I felt there was something it shared with our work. The way a certain intuition I’d had about a character’s interior—the intuition that “this person is this kind of person, and it must take this much time for him to come to learn this truth” —gets translated into the language of length constraints, route design, and release schedules. When the translation is done, the character is still there. He’s there, but he’s a different person. Not a completely different person, but not the same person either.

It's easy to get one thing wrong here. To think that the 30-page T existed first, and that this T was compressed into the 10-page T. That isn't true. T never existed as 30 pages first. From the very beginning, he emerged as himself only at the site where the meeting room and the schedule, the writer's intuition and the PD's concern, all worked together—only within that site. The 30-page T never once existed. He's a ghost alive only in my head, and it's only to that ghost that I'm indebted. This debt is therefore not a debt to the T who exists. It's a debt to the T who failed to exist—but whom I believed could have existed.

It's a strange thing. To be indebted to a person who never once existed.

I'm not trying to lament the losses of translation. There's no scenario that gets completed without compression. The option of preserving all 30 pages does not exist. Working in a world where that option does not exist is our work. But I think we should at least be able to tell ourselves honestly what we are cutting as we do this work, and exactly what gets cut away. In the meeting room, you can say "removing this scene won't hurt the plot." That's the professionally correct thing to say. But outside the meeting room, sitting alone in front of the monitor at dawn, we should also be able to say something else.

'I kept T from having the time to collapse.'

A few years into this work, I've come to think that if there's such a thing as the ethics of a game scenario writer, it's something close to a certain kind of "remembering" of characters. Memory of the scenes that were cut. Memory of the branches that did not survive. Memory of characters who should have lived another way but didn't get to live that way. This isn't a sense of indebtedness or guilt. It's simply knowing the fact that it could have turned out otherwise, and carrying that knowledge into the next piece of work.

That which failed to be realized is not the same as that which does not exist. The 30-page T was not realized, but in a certain sense he is real. Somewhere in my Google cloud, somewhere in the remarks I made in the meeting room, somewhere in the cut storyboards, his several days lie folded. Beside the realized T, the unrealized T lives alongside him. The two T's refract each other, and each time I recall him, both are summoned together.

Unended, because it never once happened.

There's plenty of work that doesn't require cutting. Work where the one doing the cutting is just yourself. And yet I'm doing this work. I'm not sure why I'm doing this work. Maybe it's because cutting—and knowing exactly what gets cut away as you cut—is what I do best. Maybe it's because keeping a character "alive to a certain degree" together with many people feels harder, more honest, and more like my work than keeping a character alive alone.

"Whose friend is the NPC?"

Are they the scenario writer's friend, the user's alter ego, or just the company's asset? The answer is all three, and none of them. The NPC is the sum of all our asymmetrical loves. Too many hands have touched it to call it love, and too much heart has gone into it to call it an asset. Somewhere in between, T lives on. Without having had the time to collapse. Without knowing the one writer who remembers him.

So once more I answer the question.

"So you… write character dialogue and things like that, right?"

To put it precisely, no.

Writing dialogue, cutting it, and ultimately remembering it.

This is the work I do.