Alison Lührs builds worlds.
Maybe not literally, and certainly not alone – but she builds them, nonetheless.
As the narrative director for Seattle videogame studio Bungie’s massive hit Destiny 2, Lührs and her team are responsible for creating, maintaining, updating and populating the virtual domain of planets, bases, asteroids, and derelict spaceships that 90 million (!) people have called home.
And if that’s not a “world,” what is?
“When my mom asked me what I would be working on when I came to Bungie a little more than two years ago, I told her Destiny 2 was like a TV show in that it is continuously coming out with new content, and is always changing ... and, oh yeah, it has space wizards and cool guns and amazing characters too,” she says.
The Pasco native wasn’t even a gamer when she was at Western – she was a theatre kid.
“If I could go back in time, I would tell WWU-me to get into games NOW ... waste not a second,” she laughs. “It’s funny the way things turn out.”
Little did she know that building her own worlds for the stage – first at Western and then with the Seattle theatre group she and her friends co-founded, Mirum Mirum – would be the skillset she would use years later to keep millions of players engaged in a wholly different kind of make-believe.
Lührs left Western with a bachelor’s degree in theatre in 2011, ready to make her mark in the Seattle theatre scene, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that while passion projects nourished her soul, she needed to pay bills, too.
“The process hasn’t changed from writing for 20 people in the DUG Theatre to writing for tens of millions in Destiny 2.”
She slid into the gaming industry almost by accident when Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, owners of such iconic gaming titles as Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, hired her to be the online community manager for Magic.
“Basically, my job was to sling Facebook and Twitter posts and keep the community of players engaged,” she says. “My plan was to do social media during the day and theater at night, and somehow slip some sleep in there somewhere too.”
About six months into this job, she had an epiphany.
“I discovered that there were writers there whose job was to come up with these stories of dragons and elves and all these fantastic creatures and characters, and I began asking the creative lead to get a shot at one of these stories,” she says. “Finally, maybe just to make me go away, they gave in. But that one story turned into two, then 10, then 25 stories, and I slid from social media into Development & Design full time.”
After years of helping build the backstories for Magic she took on the challenge of being Wizards’ point person to work with software gaming studio Larian on a hugely anticipated Dungeons & Dragons computer game, the long-awaited Baldur’s Gate 3.
“My job was to help guide Larian through the complex landscape of D&D, to work alongside them on this collaboration, and to make sure the final product looked and smelled like D&D is supposed to,” she says. “I needed to give them the freedom to do what they did best while providing guardrails to keep the project in brand.”
One of the most shocking things she discovered about being an insider in the making of a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 (which ended up sweeping almost all of 2023’s Game of the Year awards) was how much acting and theatre arts go into the actual game itself.
“What do the players want, and how can we give it to them? That’s what it is all about.”
“People tend to think of the coding and the graphics, but for an ensemble game like this, the amount of voice work is just incredible. For example, in a normal movie there is, let’s say, two hours of dialogue, right? Games like BG3 put the player in charge of what equates to the lead character in a movie, but the movie is being written as the player plays and makes decisions that impact how the rest of the game resolves itself in terms of the story,” she says.
“So instead of two hours of dialogue, you need dialogue for every possible choice made by the players,” she says, “so for Baldur’s there was 140 hours of content for a single play-through.”
Just before BG3 hit the shelves, Lührs took her present gig at Bungie.
Being a part of one of the most critically lauded games of recent memory gave her considerable pull in the job market, even before it was released, and she used it to full advantage – but she wasn’t looking to repeat her work on BG3.
“My role there was less creative and more about giving our partners the space to do what they do best… not as much me making things myself,” she says. “I wanted to get back into making the sauce.”
Destiny 2 was already a hit when she got to Bungie; her job was to keep that roll going. And working alongside some incredible voice actors like Lance Reddick (“The Wire,” “John Wick”) and Keith David (“Platoon”) certainly helped provide the juice needed to see the project through to its next stage.
“This work scratches the same itch as theatre, in the end. It’s not about the applause, it’s about working with cool people to tell amazing stories,” she says. “And there are so many parallels. I run the writers room. I read scripts. We use the same feedback process in my writers room that we used at Western; the process hasn’t changed from writing for 20 people in the DUG Theatre on campus to writing for tens of millions in Destiny 2.”
The long hours required of game developers aren’t just a meme or fodder for TV shows, but Lührs says they are worth it when you are proud of the product.
“Creative work always begins from the same place – that vision of what it could be if you do it right, and dig in to take that big swing. So, what do the players want, and how can we give it to them? That’s what it is all about,” she says.
Part of her job is to work with colleagues who provide the translation of her group’s storytelling into pixels and sound.
“It all has to work together. Looking at the art design, what does it tell us about the characters, or the world? How is the design informing the immersion and the gameplay? As for the sound, the spoken dialog, music, and environmental sounds all need to be pushing the right buttons at the right time – they need to help make the emotions we are trying to engender carry forward to the users,” Lührs says.
She also knows the pressure is different when writing for 20 members of a campus audience as opposed to millions of hardcore, dedicated gamers across the world; one serious storytelling misstep and thousands of users could be off to pursue a new game.
“We know this,” she says. “It’s part of what keeps our tanks full.”
Lührs knows she is a part of a growing industry, putting it mildly.
“Gaming is a medium in the process of defining itself,” she says. “It’s a baby medium. But it just keeps growing.”
In 2022, the revenue generated by the global video game industry hit more than $249 billion. By comparison, gaming’s older entertainment industry cousins, movies and music, combined to pull in about $50 billion.
Lührs says she is happy to be along for the ride and is the first to admit her own story to this point isn’t one even her writing team at Bungie might have conceived of.
“Look, I owe so much to so many people,” she says, recounting Theatre Professor Rich Brown’s impact on her career.
Lührs credits her Theatre Department mentor, Professor Rich Brown, with providing a framework for creating inviting and engaging worlds, and for taking the kind of creative risks that keep any project from feeling old.
“Rich used to tell us, ‘Fear stops us from moving forward.’ And he was so right. You have to have a sense of boldness when you are designing a game for a lot of people. You need to take big swings. If you don’t aim for your project to be a 10, it will always just be a five,” she says.
Brown says he can see how her theatre training would pay dividends in the gaming industry.
“Western is one of few undergraduate programs in the county that teaches devising, or collaboratively creating new work for the stage that starts without a script,” Brown says.
“Devising utilizes all the traditional elements of the stage, including lighting, sound, costume, sets, but also many other elements such as color, tempo, text, spatial relationships, character, ritual, genre, and movement in order to create new worlds,” he says. "In Alison’s case, she took these foundational skills of generating new work, new worlds, from her theatre training directly into her gaming career.”
This time she also talks about the past and present impact of her father, who was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) when she was 11 and died when she was 16.
“My dad was a coach, and I love bringing his spirit of coaching into the workplace, and to help my staff feel like they are being the best versions of themselves that they can be,” she says.
As she mentions her father, tears, unbidden, fall down her cheeks. She's not ashamed of them; each one honors her father’s legacy.
“I was a Pell Grant kid who came to Western because of the help I got from those grants and scholarships. I wouldn’t be where I am today if not for that help, which is why I always try and pay that forward whenever I can,” Lührs says. “Western was the first place in my life where I didn’t feel completely alone. I made so many friendships that I still have to this day. Of the 11 bridesfolk in my wedding, 10 of them were friends from Western.”
In the 13 years since she “accidentally” joined the ranks of the games industry, Lührs has continued to work in community theater, fed her love of backpacking with frequent off-the-grid trips into the back country with her cadre of staunch WWU girlfriends, and just wrapped up her first novel – replete, unsurprisingly, with fantasy intrigue – which she hopes to sell in 2025.
“Any WWU alums out there who are literary agents, give me a call!” she adds.
As she reflects back on her 13 years in the gaming industry, she is asked what she thinks the industry will look and feel like 13 years from now, and what role she hopes to play in it.
“I think 13 years from now the industry will still be figuring out what it is. But I hope I am still telling cool stories to cool people ... and hopefully some of those people will be that next generation of storytellers.”
