It makes a lot of sense to have a guide like that; we had style guides back when I wrote for a newspaper, and in the courts for lawyerly citations. It's very odd to think of a company that relies on writing for its product turning up its nose at an applicant using a style guide.
I think the contempt was more "we don't do it the way -they- do it". Obviously, they didn't hire her, but I would hope it wasn't because the applicant was trying to use a modern RPG conventions in their submission, which would be all kinds of stupid.
I will say that this weirdness from BioWare continued when the owners of BioWare called Brian Fargo to complain about an email he wrote where one of BIS's projects was better written than BG (this was a project the BW owners had also expressed earlier contempt for).
The next fun thing is this same project they had laughed at - when they realized that the in-developement BG2 was using some of the same tropes, they called and wanted to (gulp) make sure they weren't copying it too closely. You can't make this shit up.
I had to then walk them through the basic development convention that "execution is what matters and sets things apart even if tropes are the same."
I told them it was very doubtful the executions were anywhere close. I didn't mean it meanly, but it's something that most writers are aware of. It did make me realize there was some dev fragility at BioWare, but whatever.
To their credit, without their engine, Black Isle's legacy would have been much less (no Infinity Engine games ever), so we owed them a lot, especially after Iplay kept screwing them with contracts until BioWare rightly had enough.
Also, to be fair, there were some prominent designers at Black Isle and Obsidian who literally hated BioWare games (they're still there in very high positions), so it's not like we were always saints either.
