> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://aftermath.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Writing Games With And For Cultures - URL: https://aftermath.site/writing-for-games-nicklin/ - Published: 2026-11-10T16:32:05.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-10T16:32:05.000Z - Description: 'There aren’t enough of us who get to stay; women, women of colour; there aren’t many veterans' - Author: Hannah Nicklin - Tags: Books, excerpt, Video Games [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/11/WfG_2e_Cover.jpeg)](https://www.routledge.com/Writing-for-Games-Theory-and-Practice/Nicklin/p/book/9781041158325?ref=aftermath.site) The following is an excerpt from the second edition of Hannah Nicklin's **Writing For Games: Theory and Practice*, coming December 1 from CRC Press. If you're interested in pre-ordering the book, you can use code ****DIS20** to get 20% off. [Learn more ](https://www.routledge.com/Writing-for-Games-Theory-and-Practice/Nicklin/p/book/9781041158325?ref=aftermath.site) Writing for Games: Theory and Practice *contains educational resources, case studies, and exercises for games writers. The new edition includes interviews with seven writers, including* Void Bastards' *Cara Ellison and* Kentucky Route Zero*'s Jake Elliott. In this excerpt, author Hannah Nicklin speaks with games writer and former games journalist* [*Chella Ramanan*](https://chellaramanan.com/?ref=aftermath.site)*, a writer on* Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora *and the in-development* Windrush Tales*.* \--Aftermath --- **Hannah Nicklin: Please introduce yourself.** **Chella Ramanan:** My name is Chella Ramanan. I am from the UK. I’m originally from London but grew up partly in Worcestershire and partly in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. My heritage is Scottish-Caribbean, and I’m a narrative designer and writer for games. **How did you get into game writing?** I did English Literature at university, then I worked for a little while in unrelated jobs. I was a receptionist, that kind of thing. Then I did a postgrad in journalism, and I worked in the world of PR for ages and was doing some freelance games journalism on the side. I was always writing on the side, going to writing evening classes and running a writing group. And then I discovered this ‘writing for games’ course. I’d never thought of writing games before because I thought only special people did that, people like Rihanna Pratchett – she was the only name I knew at that time. Just these mystical people behind the screen. I went on this course, and it changed everything, really. It changed my entire focus. I thought, ‘I could actually do this’ – it felt more accessible than writing novels and trying to break into publishing because you can just do it yourself. So, I started writing in Ink, just writing my own thing. And then I signed up for a game jam; that’s where [*Before I Forget*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1126600/Before%5FI%5FForget/?ref=aftermath.site) was born, and that was it – I was a game writer. **What do you love about game writing?** I love collaboration. The people in games are cool and exciting, and it’s so collaborative: on the best days, everyone makes everyone else better. On the bad days, it’s the people who get you through, too. I just feel lucky to be able to do a creative job, do something I love, and tell stories. And, because game writing is a newer form, we haven’t got centuries of precedent and experimentation. We rest on the shoulders of other forms a little, but we’re figuring out how we’re different from them too, and I find that cool and exciting. **You’ve worked at a very small scale, in a two-person micro studio, and then at an AAA scale with Massive. What was that transition like?** The first thing I found when I joined Massive is how similar it was to working in a two-person studio. Like every game has that trough after the exciting new-idea part, and then actually figuring out what the game is, what it is you’re actually doing. It’s just that Massive are doing it with a lot more people, so things are slower. You can’t be as agile or pivot quickly. You might have external partners and IP holders who are a part of the decision-making process. There are teams with certain goals that might conflict with other teams’ goals, so you’re always negotiating and compromising. Whereas in indie, a lot of the compromises are resource-based, financial. You’re looking for funding or looking for publishers, and everything’s just a little bit more hands-on and vital. You’re almost always doing six things at once, so everything is much closer to you. Decisions aren’t made far away: you have to make the decisions. At AAA, you’re more often left wondering why decisions have been made as they have. **Tell me about your role on your indie game *Windrush Tales*.** [*Windrush Tales*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1758770/Windrush%5FTales/?ref=aftermath.site) is – at the moment of this interview – still in development. It began as just a ‘me’ project. It didn’t even begin as a game. It just began as a response to the 70th anniversary of [Windrush](https://jcwi.org.uk/reportsbriefings/windrush-scandal-explained/?ref=aftermath.site), the first ship from the Caribbean to the UK. 2018 was going to have the first ‘[Windrush Day](https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/online-exhibitions/windrush-day?ref=aftermath.site)’. Britain now claims ‘Windrush Day’ as if people didn’t have to fight every step of the way to get it recognised. But there we go. We’re here now. So, it was a response to that. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write a poem, or a short story, or an editorial piece, and then I thought, ‘What about a game?’ I reached out to Corey \[Brotherson\] to see if he was interested – he also comes from Caribbean heritage – and asked if he wanted to make a small narrative game for the next year – naively, obviously, because that was 7 years ago. But he was on board. Windrush, as we know it now, is an umbrella term, not just people who arrived on that particular ship. It covers people who arrived from the Caribbean to the UK during 1948–1972\. So, I had this idea of a woman who arrived during a specific part of that era, and I wanted a woman to be the main protagonist because the image of Windrush is generally men in suits and hats and flashy ties; the women are more forgotten in that image of Windrush. I wanted to tell a woman’s story. Then Claire Morwood came on board – I was so used to collaborating with her as part of 3-Folds Games, I brainstormed with her, she consulted on it, did some game design, and it grew into a team of three. I guess my role was ‘Creative Director’. It was my job to set the overall vision for the game, writing the very top-level story treatment: where it begins, where it ends, the themes I wanted to touch on, the very early version of the NHS, to which Rose was recruited, themes of building community and having a cultural space or hub – a café or restaurant – and things that reference the [Mangrove Nine](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/mangrove-nine/?ref=aftermath.site). That is a famous part of Black British civil rights history: the Mangrove was a community hub in the 1960s and also a target of police brutality and oppression. So, my role was to keep the game on track, approve decisions, designs, and writing, but also to find us money, and to plan the process around that. **What did you expect of the writing on the game, and how did you set that expectation?** I think it’s really important to say what you like about a piece of work, as well as what you’d like to change. When I get notes myself, I find that they’re often focused on what needs changing and not what needs to stay. You need both to know what you’re aiming for. Otherwise, you can start rewriting lines that don’t have notes on them because you’ve internalised that the draft was all wrong. So, I’ve found that positive notes aren’t only good for morale, but they’re an important part of helping a writer home in on a director’s intention. **What guided your decisions on how the writing should sit as a texture in the storytelling, what the writing is supposed to do for the storytelling in the game?** A lot of those decisions were made as a result of game design conversations with Claire and Destina Connor, who does our programming. She asks great questions and is good at finding plot holes in our game structure. I had a sense of what worked, that it would be second person, for example, but we had lots of discussions about the narrative framework – a photo album, where the photos you place are your story path decisions. We had lots of discussions about who’s putting the photos in, who’s telling that story, and who’s the player character in both metas – the layer of the memory, and the layer of the photo book. **Did you have creative pillars to guide that collaboration?** The core pillar became tactility, and that was because – having started the project in response to the 70th anniversary of Windrush, and then the Windrush Scandal – I went to a lot of exhibitions, books, and collections that opened around that time. There was one at the British Library, I went to the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, and a retrospective of Black British art at the Tate. And one of the throughlines of all these exhibits was the amount of ephemera – just a lot of objects. One woman had made a piece of art out of all the arrest sheets her son had from being harassed by the police, which was really powerful. And then there was this immersive piece – [Michael McMillan’s Joyce’s *Front Room*](https://www.michaelmcmillan.uk/life-between-islands?ref=aftermath.site) – which was a recreation of a 1970s West Indian home. Caribbean homes were really united by certain objects that every home had. Like the antimacassar on the back of the sofa, the record collection, or the photo of your island ... I have one of Grenada behind me right now! And there were so many Black Caribbean people at Tate Britain, which you just don’t get usually, but they had this art that represented them, and they came. And they loved it, they saw themselves in it. I saw these people saying, ‘This is my grandma’s house’, as they were looking at this glass cabinet with little ornaments, this blown-glass sailfish ornament that everybody’s grandparents have. And posters, cards, old photographs. Oh, and the suitcase! A tiny, beaten-up vinyl suitcase which you’d come to the country with, containing everything you had, plus maybe, if you were lucky, a winter coat someone gave you. It was history mapped through objects, stories through objects. That’s why tactility became one of the key pillars of the game: tactility and the everyday as a means of telling a person’s story. **I wonder if you’d like to share – and this is not at all unusual for a small indie game being made part-time alongside full-time jobs – how a project you intended to take half a year ended up taking 7, so far.** It’s good to have a deadline, even if it’s false, so long as it doesn’t stress you out. Like with *Before I Forget*, we were put on a list of ‘the most anticipated indie games’ and we felt all this pressure to capitalise on that and launch as soon as possible, but we realised it was just stressing us out: we didn’t have a publisher, we didn’t have an investor, no one was pushing for us to make that game by a certain deadline. What was more important was not burning out making it. So, I learned from that. We’d intended for *Windrush* to come out in 2019, but then it didn’t, and that was okay, and then 2020 happened. 2020 was a bad year for everyone, but it was a particularly bad year for Black people. We barely did anything that year – it was hard to make that game in a year where it felt like nothing had changed, or had even gone backwards. Life just gets in the way of side projects, and that’s okay. We got some Arts Council England funding, which meant we could pick it up again in 2022/2023\. We did some workshops at the British Library, we took a demo to Adventure X, but then we ran out of money again. It’s tough right now for funding, and especially tough when you have a kind of ‘in-between’ project. Game funders don’t see it as gamey enough, and arts funders struggle to fit a game into their funding criteria. Besides that, arts funding just doesn’t operate on game levels of pay or project timescales. **Tell me more about the workshops you ran for Windrush generation people as part of the process of developing the game.** It was great! But it was also hard to explain – they only had references for games like *Call of Duty*. Quite a few had been brought by their adult children; they’d come because they loved their children but were a little sceptical about the ‘game’ part. We learned quite a lot. For example, they didn’t identify as ‘Windrush’ because they didn’t come on the Windrush. They’d been given this name by history, but they didn’t fully use it themselves. There were lots of little things like that which they’d get stuck on. But we also had positive feedback too: we have this party scene in our demo, and it ends with a party scene – they loved that. It’s a very Caribbean thing to have those gatherings, that space of freedom and community. Their feedback helped us see what we were doing right. It was hard doing those workshops, though. You want them to feel seen and represented, but to get that, you have to let them challenge and interrogate your choices. Even when it was positive feedback, it was difficult. One of the older women really loved Rose, really identified with her, which was great, but also then you’re faced with the weight of representation, of expectation. And not even the four people in her room wanted the same things. There were younger people who would respond to the meta character placing the photos, who speaks more in MLE (Multicultural London English), but the older woman said, ‘Why isn’t she speaking Patois?’ We were lucky to run the workshops with this experienced academic. She was really encouraging about how engaged people were, that it’s not often people are so engaged. She understood it was a lot, emotionally, but reassured us it was a positive thing to take away. The workshops helped us forge our path. **The name ‘Windrush’ now doesn’t only represent a generation, but also now a scandal. And the game deals with historical racism, whilst also being made through a period of resurgent racism. How do you strike a balance between representing trauma but also the joy and the everyday that made up (and make up) people’s lives?** When Corey and I started, we knew we had to represent racism, but it’s not a story about racism. Character first. You know who those people are, you know what they want, what they need, you know what their relationships are. And that’s where it all comes from. Once you have character, a fuller picture falls into place. **Let’s move on now to *Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora*, not only a wildly different scale of production but also adapting an existing IP. Can you tell me about how your role there began?** So first it was a lot of onboarding. There are lots of rules, and the world is quite meticulously built. Just from the simple tenets of the Na’vi – no metal, no stone on stone – so much comes. Because of the existing rules, there were a lot of story tropes or patterns of storytelling that we couldn’t use any more. Like leaving notes behind for a player to read – the Na’vi don’t have writing. For example, if a character is missing, how do you show that character’s state of mind, what they were thinking before they went missing, if they haven’t written or recorded it in any form? What other clues can you put together for a culture that doesn’t write anything down? Footprints, or a broken bowl. That kind of thing. It was a challenge, but in turn those restrictions allowed us to be creative. We added three new clans to the canon, so there was quite a lot of freedom there. We got to make up rituals and clan-cultural specifics, though we always had to get approvals, and it’s important to them that everything be grounded in science. It was very rigorous. **What did your role look like, from the beginning and throughout?** When I joined the process, the three clans were outlined, named, and the key outline for the story was in place. I was given a particular clan to work on – they were based in a landscape inspired by the Swedish landscape: misty pine forests. But the story treatment had been done, and it didn’t change from when I joined to when the game shipped. The landscapes, the biomes, were pretty much fixed. And key characters were established as well. I got to populate the Kame’tire Clan. I was the narrative contact for them. There were something like 11 secondary characters and a bunch of tertiary characters. I got to name them, give them backgrounds and bios. We worked out a naming culture and how those cultures reflected each clan – and the quite strict rules about naming in Na’vi culture – like for example, the Aranahe Clan are weavers. They work with fine fabrics and silk, so they had elegant and musical names. For the Kame’tire, I used lots of ‘u’s and ‘z’s and things like that. Then we’d create a pool of names and get them approved by the creator of the Na’vi language. Then, once the story the directors had proposed got approved, we got a blueprint – the blueprint is where the directors decide the number of quests in each region, and each chapter of the game. So, like, 10 quests in each, and here are the key plot beats for that area too. So, I would be assigned a quest, and then I’d work with my quest designer and level designer on what that quest looked like: how you get from A to B. We’d figure out how we wanted to tell the story together – do the narrative design, basically. And then, once those things were approved in quest design documents, we’d start making the quests. The first thing writers need to do is write the cinematics as soon as possible because they go off right away. They have to be recorded, and there’s an expensive recording schedule for mocap, VO, and actors. They become the tent poles we have to work around – often to the chagrin of other disciplines because, after that point, you can’t change details in them. **Pandora is anchored in an Indigenous community being subjected to human colonialism. How did you approach this theme as storytellers in a way that felt respectful to the real-world correlates of colonial harm?** We did a lot of research and consulted with Indigenous people. We had a library that had everything from Indigenous folk tales to building techniques, and colonial histories of oppression. We watched lots of documentaries and first-person accounts of ‘reculturisation’ schools in [North America](https://www.pbs.org/video/unspoken-americas-native-american-boarding-schools-oobt1r/?ref=aftermath.site) and, in the Nordics, the [Sámi people](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/30/a-lot-of-collective-trauma-swedens-indigenous-sami-people-speak-to-truth-commission?ref=aftermath.site). We had a colleague from Greenland who gave a talk for the narrative team. It was something we were very conscious of trying to get ‘right’, and across the project we also wanted to bring people with us. We tried to be custodians of the care we all took with the themes. We even tried to shift the language we used in production. Western-centric ideas like ‘houses’ and ‘paths’ – we tried to avoid using that language. Narrative Director Annie Reid was strong on that because language cements other ideas and design assumptions which would have crept into the game. We also got feedback from cultural consultants, and not just from North America – Australia as well. We also did a lot of work to make the clans feel distinct: that they had lived for a long time, that they were more than just somewhere that quests for the player came from, that the clans had deep histories, backstories, and relationships. It didn’t come up a lot of the time, but it could immediately make a side quest more interesting because not only were you working with two characters, but you knew one fancied the other, and that immediately gave it more texture. That was important because the clans shaped each chapter. How they were broken, how they’d responded to the colonial invasion was part of what shaped them and what made them different. And within clans too: not everyone agreed with the decisions of their leaders. Some did, some didn’t. Some had lost people and blamed humans, and some had lost people and blamed the leadership, or themselves. The clans examined different responses to colonial oppression and the destruction of their world. **What are you most proud of?** Nor is one of the Sarenti children, and he’s really damaged and traumatised, and was a key figure in my chapter with the Kame’tire. It’s when the whole story comes to a resolution on the mystery of what happened to them. Some of Nor’s responses to things are some of my most personal work, having had racist teachers, you know, being able to tap into those experiences to write for him. The other characters have their trauma, but they keep it together more than Nor. I’m glad we were able to explore someone who can’t keep it together in that way. There are also lots of things I’m proud of that never made it in. When you’re dealing with an IP that’s so broad, there are always top-secret other projects going on. This meant that sometimes we’d be mysteriously told we couldn’t do something. That can be hard; you put a lot of love and investment into these ideas and proposals. We had a lore person with us – she had an incredible amount of knowledge, and, as the project went on, working with her gave us the ability to often judge or guess for ourselves that something wouldn’t be possible. But approvals happened constantly, and early, which was important with an IP partner who was very meticulous. **What is your advice to writers new to games, or new games writers?** If you write and are new to games: understand how your writing impacts other teams. If you write a scene that has a horde running over a hilltop, art and animation will die; cinematic budget is spent. Even just writing a character handing something to another can be expensive. Read that essay on [why doors are hard in video games](https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/?ref=aftermath.site) – it’s not always what you’d expect that’s hard. For new games writers: read scripts and screenplays, and try to understand the conventions. And make your influences broad: draw from things other than film and games. Go beyond the ‘easy’ reaches. Go beyond streaming services. They can be niche, but they should be broad and come from lots of places. Do the craft. All my projects have taught me things I wouldn’t have learned any other way. And other writers have taught me so much, too. Having other writers you interact with personally – peers and colleagues rather than a few out-of-reach people that you look up to – is important. You need fellow writers where you are, or near where you are. They all have something you can learn from. **How do you survive?** I don’t know! Pettiness, belligerence, tenacity. I don’t want to say ‘be nice’, but there’s something to be said for being someone people like to work with. Respecting other people’s craft is important. It doesn’t protect you from layoffs, of course, so also: be lucky. This is also my third career; maybe it helps to come to it later? And there aren’t enough of us who get to stay; women, women of colour; there aren’t many veterans. Be kind. Be respectful. Be lucky.