Plot is the Skeleton, Narrative is the Flesh and Blood: Dispatch Studio Weighs In
In a talk at the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming, AdHoc Studio’s creative directors and co-founders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart delivered a deliberately provocative statement: if a video game is to be considered a true narrative work, its writing must be good. While this may seem like self-evident truth, the duo argues it is a standard the industry has too often failed to uphold. Their core thesis, drawn from their work on the acclaimed episodic workplace comedy Dispatch, rests on a critical and often misunderstood distinction: plot and narrative are not the same thing. An obsession with the former at the expense of the latter results in forgettable experiences, while a focus on narrative craftsmanship—specifically, on great dialogue and character work—creates games that resonate long after the credits roll.
The Industry’s Vague Praise: What Does “Best Narrative” Really Mean?
Herman and Lenart pointed to the plethora of industry awards for “Best Narrative” or “Best Story” as a symptom of a larger problem: a fundamental lack of specificity in critical language. These terms have become catch-all buckets that can refer to anything from a complex branching story structure to environmental lore discovered on scattered audio logs. While all are valid narrative tools, the AdHoc directors believe the core of memorable narrative is consistently being glossed over. “When you walk out of a movie theater, you don’t tell your friends you thought the narrative was great. You talk about the writing,” Lenart stated. This direct, writer-centric evaluation, commonplace in film and television criticism, has not been consistently applied to games. Herman supported this by posing a rhetorical question to the audience: “How many of your favorite TV shows would you say the plot is great but the writing is terrible? We expect more from other mediums than we do our own.”
The implication is clear. The games industry has, at times, congratulated itself for ambitious plots and structural innovation while letting subpar dialogue, thin characterization, and awkward pacing slide. For AdHoc, the word narrative has a more precise and demanding definition. It is not merely the sequence of events (the plot), but the quality of the writing that brings those events to life, particularly through the words characters speak. “Narrative is a word of multitudes, and for AdHoc it means ‘great dialogue,'” Herman explained. This focus on the moment-to-moment exchange, the verbal texture of the world, is what separates a functional story from a compelling narrative experience.
Building Memorable Characters Through Dialogue, Not Plot Mechanics
This philosophy was the bedrock of Dispatch‘s development. Instead of designing an elaborate, twist-heavy plot, the studio focused its creative energy on crafting complex, believable characters and then writing the dialogue that would define them. “We intentionally told a very simple story, but with complex characters,” Lenart said. “By focusing on writing great dialogue for interesting characters, we knew that no matter what the plot ended up being, we’d have something special and entertaining.” This approach inverts a common development trap where characters serve as pawns to move a pre-ordained plot forward. Here, the plot emerges from the characters’ desires, personalities, and conflicts, as expressed through their conversations.
The result is a narrative where investment is personal rather than procedural. Players are not driven solely by the question “What happens next?” but more powerfully by “What will they say next?” and “How will this relationship evolve?” This creates a deeper, more emotional connection. “You need to write memorable words,” Herman emphasized. “Memorable words mean you’ll have memorable characters, and memorable characters mean memorable relationships that people will actually care about.” It is this chain reaction—from line of dialogue to character to relationship—that forms the true backbone of a narrative game, a backbone far more resilient than any contrived plot point.
A Practical Methodology: Treating Writing Like Core Gameplay Design
AdHoc’s commitment to writing excellence was not merely philosophical; it was operationalized through a rigorous, iterative production process that treated the script with the same importance other studios reserve for gameplay systems. Recognizing that writing quality is difficult to gauge in a vacuum, the studio employed an interactive script tool that allowed the entire team to “playtest” the script during the writer’s room phase. This enabled rapid identification of dialogue that felt unnatural, jokes that didn’t land, or emotional beats that fell flat. “If it’s not working on the page, it’s very likely not going to work on the screen,” Lenart noted, framing script revision as an essential pre-production bug-fixing stage.
This iterative loop was then stress-tested at a higher fidelity. Following script revisions, AdHoc would record temporary voiceover and create a storyboard animatic—a moving comic book of the scene. This animatic was then used in a final, large-scale playtest with approximately 100 blind testers from around the world. The goal was explicit: determine if the story and characters were genuinely resonating before a single frame of final animation was commissioned. This data-driven approach to narrative validation allowed the studio to enter full production with what Lenart called “absolute confidence” in its vision. It prevented the massive resource sink of animating, voicing, and integrating scenes that would ultimately fail to connect with players, a common and costly pitfall in narrative development.
Beyond Branching Paths: Narrative as a Quality of Experience
The AdHoc method challenges another industry assumption: that narrative ambition is synonymous with player choice and branching storylines. While non-linear storytelling is a powerful tool, Lenart clarified that when people praise narrative in games, they should specify what aspect they are discussing. It could be the environmental storytelling of a desolate landscape, the procedural generation of quests in a sprawling RPG, or the tight, linear character drama of a game like Dispatch. The medium’s strength is its plurality of narrative methods.
However, irrespective of the chosen method, the quality of the writing within that framework remains paramount. A branching narrative with poorly written dialogue in every branch is not a superior narrative experience to a linear story with exquisite writing. The focus must remain on the craft. By elevating the writing process to a discipline as iterative and testable as game design itself, AdHoc argues that studios can achieve consistency and excellence. This is not about diminishing other forms of narrative expression but about applying a fundamental quality control to the words that, in most narrative games, form the primary interface between the player and the fictional world.
The path to creating a memorable narrative game is not necessarily through a more elaborate plot, but through a more rigorous dedication to the craft of writing itself. By clearly distinguishing between the sequence of events and the quality of the dialogue that animates them, studios can focus their efforts where they matter most: on creating characters that feel real and conversations that players remember. As the industry moves forward, the challenge set forth by studios like AdHoc is to hold interactive writing to the same high standard as other narrative mediums, ensuring that the stories games tell are not just structurally impressive, but fundamentally well-written.
