anduin It's tricky. But as I said before, very often "oodles of experience required" is a way of screening people through voluntary avoidance. If Bioware says, "We're looking for a writer to help us with the next Mass Effect game!" they will get thousands of applicants from their fans. But if it says, "We're looking for a writer with 3-5 years' experience and at least two AAA shipped titles and a B.A. degree in Creative Writing, Communications, or an equivalent field" it can reduce the number of applicants to a manageable pool because 99.9% of the prior applicants won't satisfy the criteria, and 95% of them will pay attention to the criteria. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Bioware needs or wants someone with that experience -- they just don't want thousands of unqualified applicants to sift through.
At least two of the game-writing jobs I've gotten, the only two that had such experience requirements posted (TimeGate and Bioware) hired me despite my lacking the experience required. A third, Stormfront Studios (what a name!) brought me in for an interview and seemed to be suggesting they'd offer me the job if I'd drop out of college, but I can't tell if the design director was just being nice or what. (She was very nice, although I remember being appalled that she'd never played PS:T or any of the other RPGs I rattled off -- this was when they were about halfway into making the ill-fated Pool of Radiance game.)
The thing is, you need
something to get them to treat your application as "otherwise qualified" rather than "lunatic or idiot player who stubbornly persists in thinking he can make games because he plays games." In my case, I think it was probably (absurdly) my academic pedigree. I'd like to believe it was also the quality of my (short story) writing samples I provided, but I'm skeptical since I now realize that fiction writing is almost wholly unrelated to game work, especially RPG work. I think they basically said, "I dunno, he seems to know how to perform under arbitrary rules and show up and check boxes well, at least we can be relatively confident he won't be a total screw up."
A friend of mine who applied for a job at CD Projekt got far into the process, too, without the required experience, though he didn't ultimately get hired.
My general suggestion is that you should make hobby games that showcase the skills you want to sell. There are ample options now for doing that (RPG Maker, Twine, Choice Script, NWN2 or whatever the current equivalent to that is). You can also try gathering up unrelated credentials that nevertheless show you're not a total screw up -- like Gavin seems to have gotten his start writing Cracked.com articles. I think
Darth Roxor's thoughtful editorials would possibly put him in the same camp, but I will say that pseudonymous RPG Codex articles probably are entitled to less weight in this regard than other things might be. Basically what you're trying to do is put together a resume / c.v. that
at a glance looks non-bullshit. "Under the name anduin wrote the following seven posts on RPG Codex" doesn't really work in that regard, even if the posts are brilliant.
(Thus, for example, my article about Age of Decadence, which I think is probably one of my better pieces of writing, is essentially worthless professionally, while the random short story I wrote and published in a random fiction zine for $5 in college has considerable worth because it rounds out my "published two dozen stories" on my resume, and when people ask, I can say, "Yes, those were all paid, and 10 of them were print." "I wrote something on a site called 'Gamasutra' about some game you never heard of" is cringeworthy.)
If anyone is seriously interested in applying, I'm happy to read a writing sample and offer a letter of introduction/recommendation -- even though I don't know anyone at Larian, the absurd nature of the world is that such things are sometimes enough to get you out of the slush pile.