nealiios

In absolute agreement with you old friend, as regards writers needing to be designers too. I can think of a bajillion stories that I'd love to tell, but "Hamlet" would not be a very entertaining RPG, however well-written. (Though it'd be fun in a sick sort of way to take all of Shakespeare's plays and turn them into NWN2 mods, and then present them like the gaming equivalent of the old Gold Key comics when we were youngins.) As for there being a seperate category for writers though, it's not like we're really being picked on. In the film industry it isn't at all uncommon to see someone listed in the credits as a director, writer, producer and an actor simultaneously. Its simply acknowledgement that individual X has contributed in all those different capacities. To be fair to some of the other sub-specialties of design, you'd need to have categories for Technical Design, Scripting, Interface Monkey, etc. etc., but I don't think that's all that unreasonable. It's not like anyone other than us and the folks over at Moby even read what our credits are anyway. (Has anyone ever done something where's there's a bonus bit of gameplay at the end of the credits, like they've done with movies in the past? Now that would be a funny way into luring people to read them all.) All that said, I feel your pain. I can think of several games where I would have been ripped off by this crediting schema. Of course by the flip side of the coin, there are a number of games where I was initially hired to write stuff but ended up designing quests but never got a seperate "design" credit. So I think it goes both ways currently.