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THR explores the path that brought Desperate Housewives: The Game from its humble beginnings as a brainstorm by a Buena Vista interactive exec who thumbed through the company's annual investors' report and asked, "Now which members of the Disney family would be fun to blow away in a first-person shooter?" to a fully realized, immersive reality set on Wisteria Lane. The title's biggest cheerleader is Scott Sanford Tobis, a sometimes writer for the TV series hired to script the game, and who was immediately struck by the project's liberating lack of constraints. (Read: There was no Marc Cherry hovering over his laptop, snapping, "But Gabrielle would never say that!" before insisting he replace the exchange with a hilarious nun-punching sequence.) What's more, Tobis sees games as a viable prospect for TV writers who, not unlike the trend of feature directors working in TV, may want to expand their employment opportunities by slumming diversifying in another medium:

The intricacy and depth of storytelling found in some contemporary games reflects the influence of a new generation of writers like Tobis, who move freely from penning film and TV projects to games.

"The game developers are starting to understand that the dialogue in games can't be the kind of dialogue that existed 10 years ago," Tobis says. "It's important to the future of gaming. Writers of video games, and some of them may come from Silicon Valley rather than Hollywood, are bringing a new level of sophistication and complexity to games."

It remains to be seen if Hollywood's once fat, now starving sitcom writers—a famously prideful bunch—are willing to cede all hopes of ever achieving their destinies of Reba co-producer greatness, in favor of the less glamorous, but no less honest, work that comes from writing Grand Theft Auto punch-up dialogue.