Video game writing, especially for MOBAs, means there’s always a bomb under the table. Most players come to the story knowing that the hero will survive at least long enough to show up on the game map and kill the other heroes over and over. I have a friend who doesn’t like superhero movies because he knows they’ll live to see the sequel. When a bomb is under the table, a mundane scene that shows character will turn up the heat and the charm. I don’t remember anything about the Thor movie except Thor enjoying coffee.
As a video game writer, you can see this as a difficulty or twist it to your advantage.
For example, before you meet Ardan in the lore, you know Catherine is going to attack his family. If you’ve played with Ardan, Celeste, and Vox, you know that the kids survive. At the top of the story “Impossible Decision,” there is an illustration of Ardan protecting his terrified kids as the shadow of Catherine kills the shadow of Julia, Ardan’s wife.
I came at this story knowing that my readers would know all of this, but I still needed to create tension. So, before the Stormguard attacks, Julia and Ardan have a stupid argument about a goat. You can tell that this couple argues about this kind of thing often: Julia doesn’t have real farming skills and Ardan is intimidated by her royal lineage. Ardan even insults Julia to their daughter. The whole argument, the reader is compelled to scream at these characters. Stop arguing! This is the last time you’ll ever speak to her! The knife twists deeper if you read farther; Julia knew that she was going to die that night. Why did she choose to have this argument? To throw Ardan off the truth? Or because she was feeling tense and scared and took it out on her husband? (I don’t know, but I prefer the latter.) Fifteen years later, Vox plays a recording of this very argument when Ardan is repeating his mistake.
My readers know way more than my characters do. It’s important to create tension in the story anyway:
The reader knows that it’s Daisy inside Alpha, but Kestrel’s realization is heartbreaking because Kestrel, until then, hasn’t seemed to care about anyone but herself.
Readers know that the dragons that hatch from the eggs that Lorelai delivers to Adagio devastate humanity, and she does it for a single orange.
In “The Shield and The Bow,” Catherine and Kestrel have a casual conversation surrounded by the bodies of Catherine’s army when the Stormguard have come to kill her.
My favorite example: In “The First Mistake,” the story rewinds and we see Lyra happy for the first time. She’s having the most mundane morning with her lover, Titus, when she gets the news that she must leave him to serve her country. But the reader knows that she will spend twenty years in a freezing mountain, raising an angry boy who will burn her life’s work to the ground, and that she will never be loved again. We also know that Titus will have a miserable marriage and turn into a useless drunk. The reader should want to scream at Lyra, while she reads her marching orders in bed, Don’t do it! Run away! Do anything else! This sentiment is mirrored in two ways: in Lyra’s in-game voiceover “death” lines, and when Reim meets Samuel:
“If you don’t wanna end up like my son,” said Reim, closing his eyes, “don’t bother with the tenth level of Gythian mage discipline. Swab the deck of one of the ships hauling crystal out of Trostan. Tend one of those balmy Lillian vineyards. Heck, collect creature eyeballs with those walking furballs. Forget about magic, and forget about Gythia.”
Mundane plot and dialogue is a fantastic tool to use when there’s a bomb under the table. It’s easy to write the part where magic explodes out of the ancient staff and minions fall, mangled, to the ground. Players won’t care about that - they can choose any one of a hundred games where that happens. Players care when a girl who can twist the stars and create black holes is in a rusted-out Ferris Wheel car, telling her brother to stop rocking it.