T w e n t y S i d e d
Leslee Beldotti sent a question to our podcast this week. As I thought about the topic, I realized it was too big and I’d never be able to do it justice on the show. We’ve touched on this topic many times in the past, but we’ve never gone in-depth. So here it is…
Dear Diecastians,
Greetings from Berlin!
For the past few months I have been playing Outriders, from Polish developer, People Can Fly.
I realize that as a 54 year old woman, I am probably so far outside this game’s intended demographic that I could be in the next galaxy, but this game is emblematic of worrying trend I have been seeing in AAA gaming: THE WRITING IS ATROCIOUS!
Everything about this game’s writing — the story, the characters, and the dialogue — is juvenile, emotionally immature, and downright mean-spirited.
What is going on?!?! Why does it seem that game studios no longer prioritize quality story writing and dialogue in their games?
Am I just getting old?
Your devoted fan,
Leslee Beldotti
So let’s interrogate this. The first thing we need to acknowledge is that…
Money Isn’t the Problem
The curt answer that people typically throw out goes like this, “Game companies figured out that bad writing doesn’t hurt sales, so they don’t bother to spend money making it good.” And if you’re happy with that answer, then you probably won’t have any use for the rest of this. But I find that explanation kind of unsatisfying, so I want to look deeper and see if we can find some systemic faults to blame this on.
For one thing, I think bad writing does hurt sales. (Or if you prefer, good writing boosts sales.) The Last of Us, Portal 2, and Borderlands 2 were all bolstered by the widespread praise of their writing. Metroid Other M and Hitman: Absolution were singled out for their terribly mishandled stories. As it turns out, critics don’t enjoy bad writing. At least, when they have the time and skill to detect it. And while the narrative tastes of the average videogamer cause them to give a free pass to crappy stories when paired with solid gameplay, in the end they will complain if the story is bad enough. That means that bad writing will drag down Metacritic scores. And we know that publishers believe that those scores are important. So cutting corners on writing doesn’t make a lot of sense as a money-saving measure.
Moreover, developers do lots of things that don’t directly drive sales. You can’t make a business case for having a custom font and an animated scene for the title screen / main menu. You can’t point at a spreadsheet and say, “If our main menu options slide around and animate as the user scrolls through the list, then it will result in us selling N additional copies.” Games are a creative and collaborative medium, and thus lots of effort gets spent on little details that don’t fit the barebones “Tentpole AAA Video Game Template”.
People who make games don’t like making stuff that sucks. So even if the publisher doesn’t care about writing quality, that doesn’t mean that the people making the game will go out of their way to make sure the writing is terrible.
And finally, good writing doesn’t cost that much. Sure, maybe a talented writer can demand a higher salary than a bad one, Assuming the employer can tell the difference. We’ll come back to that in a bit. but it’s not like they make five times as much. Most writers – good or bad – are going to fall into a fairly predictable salary band. Maybe the great writer makes 50% more than the lousy one, but on the scale of a AAA project that spans years and involves hundreds of people, the salary of one person doesn’t matter that much. Writing is so important to the quality of the final product, and the difference between good writers and bad is basically a rounding error in the overall budget. Cutting corners on writing to save money is like leaving the tires off your car to save on fuel. Sure, your car won’t be as heavy, but maybe there are less critical systems you could start with for weight reduction, you know?
I know I’m always complaining that the AAA publishersEA, Activision, and Ubisoft are the big offenders here. don’t know what they’re doing, but even those doofuses ought to be savvy enough to spot the inherent contradiction in this:
- Aiming for a cinema-focused design with lots of cutscenes.
- Obsessing over metacritic scores.
- Funding $100 million projects.
- Trying to save a few thousand dollars by having some dumb kid write the story rather than a professional writer.
That sounds implausibly idiotic, even for a AAA publisher. So if you’re willing to humor me for the next 3,000 words, then let’s set aside this idea that stories suck due to budget limitations and look for other systemic problems that we could use to explain this.
(In case it’s not clear, I’m focusing this discussion on story-driven AAA games with cutscenes and dialog, since those are the games we’re usually talking about when we complain about bad writing. I’m making this clear up front to ward off all of the objections along the lines of, “But what about Dark Souls / Minecraft / FIFA 2020 / Spelunky 2? Nobody found anything wrong with the writing in those games!”)
Writing Looks Easy
The Dunning-Kruger Effect was a really popular topic of conversation a few years ago. Among laypeople, the idea has since fallen out of favor and it doesn’t carry the weight it used to. People claim that newer studies have trouble replicating the effect, or that the effect is an overly-simplified explanation for a much more complex phenomenon. I don’t know. All of that is outside my area of expertise.
In case you missed it, the DKE goes something like this: People who are ignorant regarding $TOPIC tend to vastly overestimate their mastery of it. The classic example is the boss who watches a documentary on $TOPIC and then decides he’s now an expert in the field, because he’s blind to the vast oceans of details, exceptions, controversies, and complexities that weren’t shown in the film. In the workplace, someone suffering from DKE will have a lot of self-confidence in a job interview, and they’ll be hilariously overconfident when taking on new projects. They’ll eventually be dragged down once their perceptions collide with reality, but only after they’ve created a ton of problems for everyone else.
Personally, I imagine that the DKE is a bit situational. It’s not just ignorance, but ignorance combined with arrogance, optimism, and a personality that is fundamentally incurious and dismissive of criticism. Moreover, this problem can only be expressed in a domain that allows for it.
In the world of programming, it’s very hard for a know-nothing to get anywhere. If you can’t program, then you won’t know what to type. A bad carpenter will still be able to pick up a length of wood and shove it into a table saw, but a programmer that doesn’t know how to program will have trouble even beginning the task. Even if they figure out what to type, their wrong code won’t compile. Even if they get it to compile, it’ll probably crash on startup. And even if it manages to run, it will probably malfunction obviously and catastrophically.
It takes a lot to overcome those basic hurdles, which probably does a half-decent job of weeding out the people at the very bottom. You might not realize you’re bad at programming, and you might be able to fool the interviewer, but you can’t bluff your way past the GNU C and C++ compiler. Sure, there are still bad programmers out there. I’m just saying the floor is higher in some domains than in others.
For contrast, writing (particularly writing fiction) is one domain where you can plausibly fake your way through the early stages. Assuming the writer is skilled enough to form complete sentences and get everything spelled right, then it’s not hard to bang out a couple of pages of imitative dross that seems “good enough” to the layperson.
The Hidden Complexity of Storytelling
Link (YouTube) |
People have a hard time judging the quality of writing, because a lot of it involves non-obvious structural work that the audience sort of takes for granted.
Leslee cited Outriders specifically in her question. I haven’t played it myself, but I’m going to use it as a jumping off point for talking about structure. Specifically, I want to draw attention to a tiny moment that appears at 1:07 in this IGN review. It goes like this:
Girl With Too Much Eye Makeup:
You must’ve lost people.
Dumb Meathead:
Yeah. (Pause. Suddenly quiet and introspective.) We all did.
I can’t find that exact moment in the agonizing two hours of cutscenes that make up the Outriders story. Maybe it’s an optional conversation, or maybe the game branches, or maybe I’m just blind. Whatever. I want to focus on this moment because it allows us to look at how large-scale story construction will impact small moments in a story. I’m not saying this specific moment is bad,Although I gotta say, I’m not enthralled so far. I’m just using it to illustrate how bad moments are created.
The scene we’re looking at here is very clearly aiming for the “trauma confessional” trope where one character opens up and reveals some moment of personal trauma from their backstory. Yes, it’s cliché. But lots of great movies have cliché moments in them. You can find examples in the Matrix, Star Wars, and Marvel movies. As TV Tropes will tell you, Tropes are Tools. And the difference between a trope and a cliché is mostly about execution.
The trauma confessional is a powerful moment in the story. It serves a dual purpose: It reveals something about the character doing the confessing, and it also acts as a bonding moment between them and the listener.It might also serve a third purpose by telling us more about the world or our adversary.
However, the trauma confessional shouldn’t come out of nowhere. We need some sort of catalyst scene. Maybe a loss or a setback. Maybe our heroes have a disagreement and this confessional moment is where they make amends. The important thing is that this moment needs to be motivated by the scene preceding it.
But wait, there’s more! The confessional scene is a payoff scene. Its purpose in the story is to answer a question that the writer posed earlier. In Lethal Weapon, why is Martin Riggs such a whacky loner?His wife died. In Die Hard, what made Al Powell afraid to draw his weapon?Earlier in his career, he accidentally shot a kid. In Guardians of the Galaxy 2, what made Nebula want to kill her sister despite them both being victims of Thanos?Thanos forced his daughters to fight each other. Gamora always won, and after each fight Thanos would replace some part of Nebula’s body with cybernetics, in an effort to “improve” her. Why did Nebula blame her sister for this? Eh. It’s complicated.. What brought Nico Bellic to Liberty City?He’s looking for the person who betrayed his unit and got (almost) everyone killed. The writer needs to ask the question, or the audience won’t care when we get the answer.
But it’s not enough to just pose a question. The writer needs to make the question relevant to the story. The growth of this character needs to be tied to the events of the story, either practically,The character must overcome this personal problem before they can overcome the antagonist. thematically, This character’s personal problem helps to illustrate or underscore some aspect of the story. or (preferably) both. For example: Maybe this character makes poor decisions based on personal greed, and this causes them to make mistakes. So then when they are brought low, they do a Trauma Confessional where they explain that they grew up in desperate poverty. Their recent behavior is actually driven by the fear that they’ll somehow fall back into poverty, and this fear highlights what the writer is saying about the damaging effects of being poor.
That’s nice, but none of this will mean anything if we don’t care about the character in question. So before they do any of these other things, the writer must first kick off the story by introducing us to this person, humanizing them, and getting us to root for them despite their flaws.
All of this leads to a dependency chain:
- Introduce relatable character.
- Reveal the central conflict of the story.
- Illustrate the character’s flaw.
- Pose the question of why the character behaves this way.
- Tie their flaw to the central conflict.
- Have a catalyst event that causes introspection or candor.
- Stop for the Trauma Confessional where we finally learn the source of the behavior
That’s seven different scenes / story beats, all of which need to be done in the proper order and all of which need to land in order for this confessional scene to really work. And keep in mind that all of this stuff is linked to the other character arcs in complex ways. A well-told story often forms an interlocking structure of moments that depend on one another.
And then a game designer – thinking himself to be a writer – watches the movie. He only understands the Trauma Confessional scene in isolation. “Bah. That’s easy!” he says. “You just need character A to tell a sad story to character B. I can totally do that.” So he has a Trauma Confessional scene without laying any of the necessary groundwork. The result is concentrated, weapons-grade cringe.
The same goes for countless other kinds of scenes. A confession of love. A promise of vengeance. A betrayal. A cataclysmic showdown. A poetic death. A tragic death. A shocking surprise death. A resurrection. A tense standoff that ends peacefully. These are all scenes that – when executed properly – will leave an impression on the audience. Some of those audience members will fail to understand the time and care required to set these moments up. And some of those people will go on to write videogames.
Bad Cinematography
A lot of bad stories have the additional problem of being badly told. While the two aren’t necessarily linked, It’s possible to have a great story with a bad presentation, or vice-versa. they do have a common root cause: Someone watches a movie, perceives only the superficial details, and then assumes that they can easily make their own work of similar quality.
Bad cinematography is different from bad writing, but the failings of the cinematographer can end up being blamed on the writer. Excessive shot/reverse shot can make serviceable dialog feel stilted and boring. Zooming in on rendered faces that don’t emote will create dissonance between a hammy voice actor and a stoic face, and that can make the dialog feel “bad”, even if there’s nothing strictly wrong with the script as written. A failure to visually establish props and geography can leave the audience with the nagging impression that elements are entering the scene from out of nowhere. A lack of a proper soundscape can make the world feel fake and lifeless. Too little color filter can leave the footage feeling kind of flat and boring. Too much color filter can make it numbing, distracting, or confusing.
If the art team aims for photorealism, then everything gets harder. Animated characters can sit still and blink, because they’re drawn by hand and we’re used to their stillness as a cost-saving measure. But flesh-and-blood actors fidget. They emote. They redirect their gaze based on mood. They change facial expressions based on what the other person is saying. But if a game designer tries that same scene with aspirationally photoreal models, then their stock poses and limited facial movement will give the whole scene a weird “community theater” vibe.
Maybe the writer imagined a moody, intense meeting with a stranger in a shadowy corridor. But then they didn’t explicitly tell the cinematographer about it in the script. Or the cinematographer didn’t understand the directions. Or the game engine couldn’t create the required mood with the given art assets. Whatever. Someone dropped the ball, and so this “moody” meeting ends up taking place in uniform lighting and the stranger ends up looking like a bored nobody instead of a faceless enigma.
Making movies is really hard!
Writing is Treated as Modular
All of this is made worse by the fact that game designers often see writing as just another game asset. Modelers make the polygons, animators make stuff move, and writers make the words. But if you’re going for that “cinematic” vibe, then you need a finished scriptOr at least, a completed story-arc and worldbuilding notes. before you start putting the game together. Note that Hollywood occasionally tries to make a movie before they have a working script, and the result is usually a disaster. If the postmortems and GDC talks I’ve seen are to be believed, then game designers make this mistake constantly.
Like I said before, good stories often have a lot of interdependent scenes. Character arcs need to be relevant to the events of the story, which needs to have a clear central conflict, which needs to fit with the themes, which needs to be revealed through dialog and action, which needs to be carefully paced to keep the viewer interested. This is a difficult task, and it takes time to do it well. Templates like the three act story structure can help the writer by giving them a solid starting point, but having a blueprint does not save you from needing to build the house. You still need to put the work in and assemble the parts.
Cinematic gamesOr rather, “””cinematic””” games. have all of the above requirements, plus all of those elements need to work with the gameplay. The only way to do that is to make sure the writing is done before you start building the world. Writing isn’t some cosmetic element that you can staple onto the game later in development.
The Systemic Dysfunction of Cinematic Games
Usually my blame-chain looks like this:
- The publisher wants the prestige (and money) of a Hollywood blockbuster.
- Making matters worse is that the company is run by ancient non-gaming dinosaurs. They can’t judge things like combat mechanics, leveling mechanics, gameplay loops, class balance, and all of the other things that concern the actual consumer. So anyone pitching a game to CEO Oldie McGolfputt needs to have SOMETHING the suits will understand, which usually means a cutscene-driven story game.
- As a result of #1 and #2, the publisher is drawn towards storytelling as a central pillar. At the same time, the leadership doesn’t know anything about moviemaking.
- The studios are full of game developers with no training in story construction, cinematography, wrangling voice actors, or directing movies. Which means the company leadership is drawn towards pursuing a kind of product that their own staff is generally unqualified to produce.
- And finally, every team is likely to have one or two designers who think they can do all of those things, because they don’t understand just how difficult and complex screenwriting, direction, and cinematography are.
This is the way I think of EA, Activision/Blizzard, and Ubisoft. I think this leadership problem is at the root of a lot of our gripes with this dumb industry.
However, this doesn’t really apply to all publishers. For example, I get the impression that publisher Zenimax is pretty hands-off, and I don’t see them pushing their developers towards being “cinematic”. Bethesda has become infamous for their horrible storytelling, from bad plotting, to cringe dialog, to potato-faced NPCs vomiting clunky exposition from their barely-animated mouths. But I get the sense that Bethesda’s dysfunction comes from much lower down on the totem pole. My guess is that it’s more of a problem with company culture than with the people at the very top.
Outriders is published by Square Enix. Ten years ago, I would have pointed to SE as an example of a company that was doing things right. But things seem to have taken a turn over the last few years. The rebooted Tomb Raider series started off a little wobbly and has been in sharp decline since then. Marvel’s Avengers is reportedly a mind-numbing grind designed to funnel people towards the cash shop, but in the rare moments when it can be bothered to tell its story it’s apparently a cavalcade of cringe. The Quiet Man scored a humiliating 28% on Metacritic, and while the story wasn’t the only problem with the game, it was still a problem. And as bad as those other games were in terms of storytelling, it seems that Outriders still managed to attain a new low.
(This is not to say that everything released by SE is bad. The Life is Strange series isn’t really my thing, but it seems to really resonate with the intended audience. The Nier games are pretty interesting. And we can’t really complain about the avalanche of legacy titles they’re re-releasing for new hardware.)
I honestly don’t know what’s going on at Square Enix. My guess is that we have a Japanese leadership in charge of western studios, and maybe that makes it hard for the leadership to appraise the quality of the work the team is putting out. We have a Japanese leadership in charge of a western developer, who is imitating western movie studios, by making a western-style story intended for a western audience. Even if the SE leadership has the skills and knowledge to spot the problems with these games, there’s always the cultural barrier to worry about.
Wow, this seems like crap to me. But I don’t know. Maybe this is what those crazy Americans are into? I can’t tell. I guess we have to trust these people to understand their own culture. Ship it.
So that’s my take on why writing sucks. The publishers aim for cutscene-heavy design yet fail to hire people suited for that sort of work. Writing is bolted onto a game as if it was a cosmetic element instead of making it part of the foundation. The non-storytellers in the trenches wrongly assume they can make a movie. None of the higher-ups know how to analyze a story to see if it’s working, so there’s no safety net for a project with a terrible writer.
I know I give Dark Souls a hard time on this site, but I actually think the Soulsborneo design is a really good way to approach the integration of gameplay and story that doesn’t require every team to have their own Steven Spielberg + Roger Deakins duo. Sure, you still need a decent writer to make passable dialog and build a world. There’s no magic formula that will make this problem easy. But if developers lean towards the approach of making the setting itself the story, they can free themselves from a lot of the complicated structural problems I talked about earlier.
Sadly, I think even this step is beyond them. When a developer signals that they’ve decided to make their own Soulsalike, they usually mean, “The game is really unforgiving.” SW™JFO™ borrowed from Souls games in a mechanical sense, but when it came to storytelling it continued to lean on the “Play the game to see the next static scene in the movie” school of design.
My guess is that we shouldn’t expect this problem to get better anytime soon.
Footnotes:
[1] At least, when they have the time and skill to detect it.
[2] Assuming the employer can tell the difference. We’ll come back to that in a bit.
[3] EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are the big offenders here.
[4] Although I gotta say, I’m not enthralled so far.
[5] It might also serve a third purpose by telling us more about the world or our adversary.
[6] His wife died.
[7] Earlier in his career, he accidentally shot a kid.
[8] Thanos forced his daughters to fight each other. Gamora always won, and after each fight Thanos would replace some part of Nebula’s body with cybernetics, in an effort to “improve” her. Why did Nebula blame her sister for this? Eh. It’s complicated.
[9] He’s looking for the person who betrayed his unit and got (almost) everyone killed.
[10] The character must overcome this personal problem before they can overcome the antagonist.
[11] This character’s personal problem helps to illustrate or underscore some aspect of the story.
[12] It’s possible to have a great story with a bad presentation, or vice-versa.
[13] Or at least, a completed story-arc and worldbuilding notes.
[14] Or rather, “””cinematic””” games.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Spoiler Warning
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Personally I get the feeling that Square Enix doesn’t actually play a huge role in games development, especially for the third party games. As long as the deadlines are met and the game looks good enough that they can show it off at E3 or TGS or whatever big gaming event is coming up they don’t care too much about the story or the details of production.
Yeah I’d agree with this assessment. To use the examples mentioned, I did not get the impression that Square Enix had much of anything to do with the Life is Strange series, which can somewhat be seen in how different the feel of the writing is in the ones developed by Dontnod compared to the ones Deck Nine made. I think they both did some good stuff, but Dontnod (being french) definitely has more of a “non-american trying to emulate how american teens talk”. The writing of those games very much feels like a product of those studios in particular.
Nier: Automata (a game I think is absolutely FANTASTIC) similarly is also very clearly a game that shows the feelings and opinions of Yoko Taro, and I don’t think there’s any feeling there of Square Enix having been involved in how the game should be written.
I suppose for both of these it’s true that they’re not what you typically call a AAA game (although Nier in particular became kind of a sleeper hit), so maybe they are more actively involved in something like the new Tomb Raider games where they also set some specific (very high) sales goals.
I think I remember hearing somewhere that (at least at one point) SE used to try to push developers to do more “cinematic” storytelling because they had a very expensive mocap animation studio and they wanted to push that as their competitive advantage.
I specifically remember that being a thing attributed to Deus Ex: Human Revolution problems in the scale of the world/story being much smaller than originally promised, which was published a decade ago, so things might have changed since then.
Typolice : The Neir games
@Leslee : I’m not a fan of the idea that studios don’t care about story anymore, implying of golden age where every game released was masterful storytelling. You probably think of a few wonderfully written game and associate their entire decade to their level of quality, and inversely take Outrider, a game that was *savaged* by everyone, as the exemplar of modern gaming storytelling.
I think the average quality in writing is higher than it’s ever been, but there is a LONG way to go before the average is good.
I think there’s something to it because of the way AAA has scaled up. “Big” gamedev is generally controlled by publishers, who are either risk averse or often led by clueless people while the development teams are increasing in size and development is increasingly compartmentalized. As a result there is both the “written by committee” effect and the “left hand knows not” effect at work.
On the one hand there is fear of being “political” or alienating a big subset of the audience, after all a AAA game needs to move literally millions of units to bring profit. Yes, there is a “head writer” but it’s generally not the person who wants to tell a story but rather a person hired to fill the narrative of something like “assassins and templars duke it out at [historical period and location]. Protag is a young male assassin and he needs to start as, like, a noob and end as a badass and go through these five historical locations, throw in one of those artifacts but don’t have it do anything too important”, then whatever that person has made has to be retailored to fit last minute changes to gameplay.
On the other hand there are going to be writers whose job is filling sidequests (or filler quests along the main questline) who may have very differing levels of knowledge about the big picture or themes of the game (I have a distinct but imprecise memory of hearing that’s how a bunch of FO3 quests came to be and the highly modular and self contained nature of many of them fits with that). And at the same time marketing will be doing its thing based on yet another set of data points, which may or may not be finalised, and then because marketing claimed something it needs to be put in gameplay which may require a change in writing… Or the other way around, something marketing showed resonated negatively and needs to be removed.
What I’m saying is that AAA development as is is just not very conductive to writing a coherent, much less ambitious, stories.
On the gripping hand between digital distribution and gamedev tools becoming increasingly more accessible there is a lot of story and writing focused indies as well as some mid-tier titles.
This is spot on for countless occasions I’ve seen on the job. Often there are many hands in many places tasked with adding to the story in the form of side quests, activities, collectables with audio logs, or different types of content that all have different amounts of scrutiny applied and different degrees of motivation/ability to involve themselves with the game’s core narrative.
To propose a few fictional examples with all-too-real anecdotal verity:
A flagship multiplayer raid mission plot helmed by a team of bigshots from another part of the company might go off in its own direction to allow for more combat and new game mechanics. It has its own team of writers that only contribute to this part of the game. Due to the team’s size/budget/prestige, they can push most of their wild ideas through even if the normal writers find them incongruous.
The Halloween DLC quest reward diaries might be entirely the product of one junior writer who’s three steps removed from the lead writers’ room. Maybe she knows a ton about the game lore, but is just finding her footing at the company and lacks either the confidence, time, or opportunity to talk regularly with the leads. As a result, the diaries end up referencing only the core plot of the game and are conspicuously blind to the ongoing alien brain worms arc.
The ambient conversations you hear during the shuffleboard minigame might be created by a codev studio in Siberia. This studio has almost total separation from the rest of the project, the culture it’s being created for, and possibly the rest of the human race. They work while everyone else is asleep, speak a different primary language, and are blissfully unaware that their dialogue is top tier youtube meme fodder the lead writers will never see until it’s far too late to alter.
Other M and Hitman Absolution were singled out for deviating from their respective franchise’s gameplay norms in favor of being more cinematic and epic, the bad writing was just the icing on the criticism cake. I do think good writing can help boost sales but bad writing, even at its worst, in games are mostly met with apathy at this point so they ultimately don’t affect sales.
I think the issue is less about the pay of a good writer (unless you’re some kind of niche celebrity like Chris Avellone) and more about just finding a good writer in a general, which isn’t simple and can come from anywhere.
It’s also possible that good writers are already present in the company but they’re swept up with everyone else and their work ends up getting diluted or lost in all the inevitable changes.
I think it might be a similar problem to what you can run into with hiring programmers. It’s really hard to determine in an interview who is a good programmer or a good writer, so you may well default to those who have done well in university and college programs on programming and writing. But being able to do well in the academic setting doesn’t mean that you can do well in industry, so they have what should be “good” writers who actually aren’t all that great, and pass on good writers who just don’t happen to have formal training or formal, professional experience.
You wouldn’t even try to determine who is a good writer in an interview.
Or by looking at how well they did in a university writing program.
You evaluate writers, or prospective writers, by reading their work. In this respect, writing is no different from painting.
I think you mean “You SHOULDN’T try to determine …” [grin]. While I agree with you, when you get into businesses, especially big ones with big HR departments, while they may look for samples they really will want something more “objective” and less time-consuming, and so that means in the interviews and looking at marks of what they think are relevant degrees.
I agree that reading writing samples is useful. The problem is that not all writing is equal. And very few aspiring writers have writing samples for writing videogames specifically to read through.
I don’t believe that there’s a general purpose concept of a “good writer” that transcends genre/medium, any more than there’s a general “good artist” that is good in all media. There’s a certain shared base of understanding, certainly, and I’d trust a novelist to write a video game more than I’d trust a surgeon. I also wouldn’t expect a brilliant landscape painter to be good at jewelry design.
In a video game (with very limited hacky exceptions) there’s no room for exposition that isn’t conveyed through dialogue. Every line has to be spoken to someone. And, with limited exceptions, those lines either need to be spoken either by or to the main character, or be spoken between characters while the main character is present. Which brings up all kinds of questions around why they’re talking about this at the time your character is there, do they know you’re there, etc. There are tradeoffs around “what does it do to my story if they don’t hear this line?” You can also use logs/audiologs, which solve a lot of problems at the expense of being (again) a hacky solution that you need to justify (how/when/why did someone record this specific snippet of text?)
Fortunately, you’re not limited to exposition – there’s a lot you can do visually to tell a story. However, there are a lot of hard restrictions here as well. If you’re trying to do environmental storytelling, you need to identify the visuals that will actually tell that story, and communicate them properly to an artist who can make it work with no dialogue. Then, you also have to figure out the tradeoff between “am I ok with them missing this thing I’m trying to say?” vs. “how much do I have to compromise using the ‘right’ art to tell my story vs. highlighting this to draw focus to it?”
Or, you can just brute force it by grabbing the camera and putting the dialogue you want and the visuals you want in a cutscene. You need to be careful with these, because they can destroy tension and a sense of empowerment. You need to be careful about not using a cutscene to drive a wedge between “what the player character did” and “what the player wants to do.” You also need to be sparing with them or people will resent you not letting them play the game.
More general concerns! Depending on how linear your game is, you might need to create a story with beats that can be experienced out of order, which is hard to do and still have those pieces have the same impact. If you have sidequests, you need to be able to have moments that make doing those sidequests “worth it” while still not being required to understand the main story. For an open world game, you need a main arc that’s both conveying a sense of urgency while allowing the user to poke around sidequests. For established IP, you need to do enough to reward players who know the history of the franchise, while being sufficiently accessible to those who are new with this installment.
Taking a step back from just writing proper, there’s also being part of a team. Even if you are in a “writing first” scenario, and you have a proper plot outline and good characters, very few videogames at scale have a single writer. This means you need to delegate and coordinate a team of people with different ideas and styles into a cohesive whole without being patchy.
Even larger than that, your videogame is a GAME. The player is here to play, not read. So every single thing you do as a writer needs to fit around having gameplay that’s fun to play. You want to have the gameplay and the story fit together, but this means sometimes letting the gameplay lead. Sometimes you need segments that exist solely to teach the controls/strategies that the player needs to defeat foes. In many cases, there are gameplay tropes that your story needs to work with (e.g. mook, veteran, and elite level foes existing), or at least not fight. There are also big-picture game systems that the writing may need to support (Paragrade, Deus Ex’ boss conversations) that need to span writing and gameplay, in ways that require both to make some level of compromise.
If your game allows multiple playstyles/builds, you need a story that makes sense for all of them. Your barbarian gnome wouldn’t choose to quietly break into the magistrate’s house late at night and burgle it, so you can’t make what you read in his diary a major plot point.
The above is not exhaustive, but it’s a list of skills a good video game writer has to have to write a good, fun game. Most of the limitations here don’t exist in a novel or play.
Judging a good game writer is hard.
“In a video game (with very limited hacky exceptions) there’s no room for exposition that isn’t conveyed through dialogue. ” Nah, ever hear of environmental story telling?
You can have plenty of room for telling things about the world and characters without having X character blab on about.
This may be another reason why video game stories suck: even if they get someone good at writing a story in the traditional senses, they don’t have experience integrating that with the things that are video games strengths.
Let’s say you have a room that belongs to the character, a study. What do you have in it? How neat is it? Do they have pictures of family, pets? If there’s books, what books? Are they all neat on a shelf, or are they scattered in the room? What’s on their desk? And much, much more.
Telling all this in, say, a novel, would be an absolute deluge, and a movie might be able to give most of it a cursory glance, but a video game let’s the player absorb it more at their own pace. You can apply this at a much broader scale too when designing the larger environments, the enemies, your allies, and more.
Maybe you are using exposition in a much more limited sense than I am here, but exposition is much more than “Well, here we are in Trope City! Where the streets are paved with tropes!” I’d say.
The risk in a video game for that, though, is that it’s also a lot easier for the player to simply ignore it and so miss all of that. In a book, you can conserve detail by only describing what’s important, and in a movie it’s easy to draw attention to important things, but in a video game grabbing the player’s attention to make them look at something — even as a plot or quest point that they need to do before moving on — can be really annoying. If it’s important to the story, you have to make sure that the players don’t miss it, but the most common ways of doing that can be annoying to players and break the context of a video game.
Ok, so it was a long post. But this is literally what my next paragraph was about.
My point here is that video games, for the most part, take away the ability to use WORDS from a writer, except through dialogue.
I actually don’t think we disagree on the larger point “writing for video games is different than writing a novel” and requires different skills.
Even if you think that strategy is a good way to filter out applicants, it only really works for recent grads. People with experience would need to be judged by their past work.
It ends up being self-perpetrating, at least in programming. The people who have the degrees get the jobs over those who don’t, and so have experience, and so get hired again, even if their work is mediocre at best.
Having a degree doesn’t guarantee continued employment, promotion, or a good portfolio. If you’re only looking at degrees, you’re going to have a lot of unskilled, unknowledgeable people getting through, and you need to fix your hiring practices.
We pretty much agree here on that not being a good way to do things, but when companies start getting into hiring in bulk and through big HR departments and so aren’t able to do individual evaluations they end up quite often looking at degrees for intro level and experience for later levels, which means that they will pass over good people without degrees in favour of less skilled people who have degrees, those people get experience and then have an easier time getting other jobs. Again, I don’t think it’s right, but it does happen and can explain writing getting worse if it’s focusing more on those with academic training than on assessing who are indeed really good writers.
Not to mention that AAA gamedev is notorious for keeping around a few big names and burning through piles of fresh graduates.
Ideally, you’d want to hire only people who have already been responsible for games with good writing.
The problem is, there are very few of those (given the generally low quality of games writing). So you might have to resort to:
An unproven novice.
Someone with a history of writing for games, but with a poor track record of quality.
A good writer in other media, with no experience writing for games. Note that someone with really good writing skills can probably make more money working for movies/TV, so finding someone talented is going to be hard here too.
Also the “quality” can be a bit tricky to verify. Let’s say I come to you with a (verifiable) credit for being on FO3 writing team. I may not even be at liberty to tell you which part I was responsible for, or what my level of responsibility was. Even if I did do you necessarily know, or going to research, if that was a good or a bad part? And even if you went that far are you ready to explain to someone higher up that you didn’t hire an industry veteran because “their characters felt flat”? As an HR person you’re probably going to just make sure my crediting list checks out and take any “history of employment in the industry” as a plus.
My recollection is that the gameplay of Other M was generally okay, aside from some Wiimote gimmicks. (I really can’t understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to make you switch to first person to fire missiles.) But the combat looked pretty stylish and the “melee counter” it introduced ended up making a comeback in later titles. The story, on the other hand, was nuclear-waste-on-fire levels of bad. Every line of dialog was painful. So I would think that if anything hurt sales, it would be the writing.
That being said, I searched up some reviews, and they’re generally more positive than you might expect. Most of them are some form of “good but flawed,” and seem to be evenly split on whether the story or the gameplay is the main flaw. IGN even called the story “emotional” and “engaging”! Possibly most reviewers just have really low standards for writing in video games.
The one exception is (predictably) Yahtzee, who spends almost the entire video complaining about the story before finishing up by saying that the gameplay is also bad, just not as bad as the story.
Other M has a worse reputation among its fanbase than it probably deserves, but as Metroid is not nearly as high selling a property as its legacy within the industry suggests, that alone can be pretty bad for the series.
One of the issues isn’t just the writing, however. It’s the voice performance, and it’s not even the fault of the actress. The intention of Yoshio Sakamoto was for Samus to give a stoic performance, which seems to be something Japanese voice actors seem to have an easier time of than Western. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, but when I hear characters that ought to be stoic in English, they’re either tinged with some degree of attitude (2B from Nier: Automata) or they sound sleepy like Samus in Other M. There’s nothing in between, whereas the Japanese voice performances somehow sound appropriately stoic or robotic. Or maybe it’s just my own particular ear? I don’t know, but it’s a curiosity, and it really didn’t help Other M much.
It’s an enjoyable game, but it doesn’t really do any of the franchise’s strengths well, and in fact tries to usurp those things without doing so effectively. One of the most cited examples is the need for the Varia Suit. The intent by the developers was no doubt to push the player through an intense, dramatic gameplay sequence that would then grant them the necessary power-up in the “nick of time”. They were trying to deliver a dramatic narrative tool or flourish through gameplay. The problem is that Samus had the capability of activating the suit the entire time, but had decided she’d do no such thing until a commander she has no reason to be beholden to decides it’s okay. It not only removes her agency (and therefore the player’s agency), but it pits the player against the commander and perceives them as an antagonist withholding Samus’ toys.
So the goal was to replace the “Beat boss, earn reward” formula with “Experience excitement, escape peril, utilize new power to feel awesome against the boss”, but the narrative logic was jarring, felt antagonistic, and now had the player despising a character that Samus spent the whole game admiring, creating a rift between player and avatar.
Oddly enough, it’s a completely different sort of writing disaster as what Shamus mentions above, as the gameplay and thematic intent is being worked on side-by-side. Unfortunately, the thing they were missing was the logic necessary to allow these moments to resonate with the player.
Other M’s problem seemed to be more about localization than simple writing. Samus and Adam were supposed to be a stoic, professional, two distant friends now wary of each other. What most people read was that Samus was wooden and clueless, and Adam was an obstructive jerk who wouldn’t let them use power bombs from the beginning of the game.
It’s a real shame because Other M had a great concept for its story. The plot was basically a decent Syfy Original Movie thriller starring an established out-of-context character. There are secrets on the station. Nobody knows who to trust. Somebody is actively trying to keep things hidden. Bodies start turning up. It would be like putting Clark Kent in a murder mystery aboard a cruise liner at sea, with him as a potential suspect. The stakes are very high, even if they don’t include mortal danger. It’s a chance to get a character out of their comfort zone and reveal new aspects of their personality.
I recall an old video about sub vs dub anime translations. A point that stuck with me was that new translations are never just the same work in a new language. The act of deciding what verbiage to represent the same story in a new tongue constitutes the creation of a new work. The English version of FLCL is as much a separate show from the Japanese version as Kurosawa’s Ran is from Shakespeare’s King Lear. So you can’t just get the original writing right. Any localization to other markets will require just as much care and work, and you’re not even going to know personally how it turned out because you don’t speak that language.
Nah, localization had nothing to do with. Samus crying when she faces Ridley until she’s saved by a man is just as stupid in Japanese then English. Samus slowly cooking while going trough lava zone because she can’t use her suit temperature control feature because “it would endanger the station” (somehow) is stupid. Samus going from independent bounty hunter who go to a planet solo to laptop who can’t decided whether to turn left or right without order from a male superior is stupid. Even the traitor plot is literally abandoned in the middle of the story, the traitor is never revealed and he die off screen, I’d call it wannabe alien but even B-movie alien ripoff do this better.
If that’s your interpretation, it’s a testament to how badly the localization failed. Did you know there was an official manga telling Samus’ origin story? You can get a few glimpses of it if you connect GBA copies of Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, which I’m sure in my heart is a thing someone else on Earth did at some point. I only ever read it on a fan site. I don’t know if it was ever made officially available in English. Yet here is this game that references important parts of it for plot points. That’s how bad the localization was. It didn’t even know how much story it needed to tell.
Having read those same manga, I’m still not going to lay the blame at the localization. As I stated above, some of it is the difficulty of trying to voice a specific type of character effectively in English. However, even knowing all of that backstory in the manga, the character does not feel consistent, nor does she seem to match the image players would have developed in their heads.
Not to say that I think the manga is necessarily bad, but “Anime Buffy the Vampire Slayer” isn’t really how I ever imagined Samus’ personality, and her personality as presented in Other M didn’t even jive well with what we saw in the manga.
Basically, every effort Yoshi Sakamoto has attempted to make in expanding the lore and universe of Metroid beyond Super has been… questionable. The better efforts – even when the writing was poor – to expand the universe have all been on the Retro/Prime side, with the Space Pirates being far more interesting (but inconsistent with the manga and Other M interpretations) in the Prime series, as well as the Galactic Federation being more interesting than generically Weyland-Yutani-but-the-military mustache twirling of Other M/Fusion, and further, Hunters actually introducing a variety of neat alien races (and, oh yeah, Echoes as well).
The biggest mistake Sakamoto keeps making is in realizing Samus is supposed to be closer to Judge Dredd than your typical protagonist: it’s not about her, it’s about the world she’s found herself in. She’s had her character arc. Now she’s unraveling the mystery of the (usually tragic) world around her. Attempts to apply a personality are ultimately flawed and, in my opinion, mistaken.
Samus is usually a silent protagonist, with maybe some scan data, upon which you can impose much of your own reactions*. It sounds to me like maybe one of the biggest mistakes of M was trying to un-silent her at all.
*I don’t recall what it may have said in the logs in Prime 3 about them, but suddenly having NPCs that needed my special badass help made the “bounty hunter,” -as in professional adventurer, thing a lot more powerful, and the marines showing up in endgame had me genuinely stoked. Meanwhile the other hunters and their inevitably being bosses you’d have to kill made me really sad considering one of them
is a shapeshifter who idolizes you (and uses your form because it makes her feel badass, IIRC), it’s just cute and then damn you Phaaze!. I’m pretty sure Samus says jack all in response to any of it, but that means I can feel whatever I want.Meanwhile the main thing I recall from the LP of Other M is the player ranting about how Samus is always going on about THE BABY (metroid, which she rescued and something something), worse than gender or power dynamics between her and the guy. Taking a formerly stoic badass and having them go through some emotional stuff because reasons is hard enough when you’re not also trying to do it as part of a franchised videogame with a protagonist whose silence is integral.
By law I obliged to share this article here, before even reading Shamus’ text
https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=11097
“RPG Codex Editorial: Without Map, Compass, or Destination – MRY on RPG Writing
Editorial – posted by Infinitron on Wed 13 February 2019, 01:29:30”
The main thesis of the article:
“Instead of a guilt-based theory, what I would offer is a theory of systemic failure. Specifically, I would blame three factors: (1) a tiny talent pool in a field that requires writers to perform in two distinct domains; (2) a lack of metrics to assess RPG writing that leaves those writers without useful guidance; and (3) a development cycle that leaves no time for revision.”
The writer of that article, Mark Yohalem, is also the writer and designer of two adventure games, Primordia and Strangeland (he also did some writing on Dragon Age:Origin and Torment:Tides of Numenera). I remember that Primordia’s writing as being good, as for Primordia I replayed it with the developer commentary last month and it’s really good; a lot of the writing relates to the themes in the games or build upon them; reading the commentary, it was interesting to see how much of the writing was intentional, like how this name was chosen for this or that allegory or this object refers to this personal event that reflects what the writer wanted to say with his game. Of course it’s also helped that it looks good, the VO sound good and fit the various characters and the puzzles are fun (at least I found them fun, YMMV).
Though that article focuses on cRPGs, so less applicable to a discussion around AAA cinematic games.
To add to the ‘modular’ aspect, games are notorious for cutting chunks out like entire levels. It might be because they couldn’t get it done in time or it wasn’t good enough to ship. Nothing to do with the story. For other reasons like bad gameplay or bugs. If story beats were in that section, they are gone too as collateral damage. Maybe they get folded into another part of the game. Likely badly or not at all.
This definitely happens.
Many of the games I’ve played that otherwise had good stories had odd moments where a story-critical detail is suddenly spaffed out, or a cutscene introduces and/or resolves far too much in one go – sometimes even introducing and resolving an issue in the same cutscene.
I’m pretty certain this is usually because the area/level which was supposed to space it out had been cut, but the writing team decided that the story beat – or simply information – was really necessary to the plot or gameplay.
Another common issue is that playtesting found that hardly any players discovered or understood an important gameplay detail, so somebody needs to explain it to the player.
– This is an upgrade station, your weapons are useless against this enemy, now is your last chance to upgrade before the final battle etc.
If you’ve already got an (unreliable) narrator-like character (eg GLADOS in Portal, Russell in HL:Alyx) then it’s relatively easy to do that, but if you don’t, then you’ve got to somehow insert this into a nearby face.
Case in point, I think this was the case for the new God of War’s most mentioned writing issue. The kid’s mood swings wasn’t quite so weird before they cut a level covering it.
They’re also quite iterative in terms of gameplay; build something, see what works, expand on what does and remove what doesn’t. So even if you started off with an amazing script, it might not work any more by the time the game gets where it’s going.
Thief: the Dark Project was originally going to be a sword-fighting combat game set in Camelot, but they couldn’t make the actual ‘swords’ part of it any fun, so they doubled-down on the sneakiness which was working quite well. For the sequel, they basically designed a dozen fun levels and then put them in an order that they could get a plot out of. Both awesome games. Helps that the ‘story’ is a minute or so of cutscene at the beginning of each level, and the occasional quip from Stephen Russell, who makes a truly tremendous job out of it.
I don’t think the writing issues are limited to video games, and so I think they might be symptoms of a larger problem. I watch and analyze horror movies on my own blog, and I find that there are a LOT of modern and even blockerbuster-type horror movies — at least they have relatively big actors attached to them — that have pretty bad writing. I can compare them to older bad horror movies and find that the older ones when they end up being bad tend to be just totally screwed up movies, but the modern ones tend to fail in the exact way you talk about here: they seem to be tossing tropes in without doing the work to develop them so that they’re effective, or often even seeming to understand what they’re used for. They add the sad, cute child or the new parent figure or the sibling conflict or whatever but don’t set it up beforehand and don’t do anything with it so it seems more like a reference than an integral part of the work. And many people — myself included — felt that The Force Awakens, at least, did the same thing to Star Wars tropes, and I thought that the Get Smart remake did the same thing for Get Smart tropes.
I wondered if the issue might be that we get so many writers who are actually trained and educated in writing through college and university programs, and so they are taught about the tropes as a kind of list but from that learn that putting them in means good writing and never really grasp that they need to do more than simply put them in. Then again, one work that I KNOW was written by someone with that education (Sara Shepard who wrote the “Pretty Little Liars” books, long story) seemed to do more development of characters and tropes than the average, so maybe that isn’t fair.
At any rate, the problem may be less AMATEUR writers and more EDUCATED writers trying to fill the increasing roles for writers but who don’t — or at least don’t yet — know how to apply their education to the practical matters of writing.
I think it’s largely the same problem as with videogames; modern blockbuster movies start out as a bunch of unrelated action scenes and then some luckless schlub has to string all of them together into a coherent plot after the fact.
That, and systematic nepotism; e.g. JJ Abrams’ merry band of hacks.
I don’t watch a lot of action movies, so that might be true there, but for the horror/science fiction movies that I tend to watch and analyze more, it really seems to me like the writers are TRYING to make a more detailed story — and often in interviews for TV shows seem proud of what they wrote — but fail because they think that tossing a trope in will suffice, or that putting in the trappings of emotion will make us care for characters that they haven’t developed, or that we’ll care about a plot element that they haven’t set up. I really think in reading and listening to some of the interviews and in watching or reading the works they really don’t seem to know how to put the pieces together, even as they think that their artistic or social merits will make the work good and entertaining.
I have a similar idea, probably not fully-formed, that a lot of the flaws in modern writing come down to “writers imitate something that came before them, not fully understanding why those things came to be in the first place and therefore botch the execution by leaving out critical elements that they failed to notice.”
I especially get these feelings when watching sequels or remakes of much older works. Robocop, the Star Wars sequels, and the new Bill and Ted movie in particular come to mind.
My go-to example is the Get Smart movie, that dropped in Get Smart references but didn’t get what made them good, and Siegfried is the prime example. In the show, Siegfried was nasty and evil, but also very funny and able to get silly in order to drive the humour. In the movie, he’s just plain mean. That ignores what made him such a beloved villain in the original show and makes him not be funny or interesting anymore.
As someone who’s taken academic writing classes, that sounds highly unlikely to me. The kind of writing you get taught in college is worlds apart from what you see in popular fiction. If genre tropes are brought up at all, it is to sneer at them.
No, I think this is another instance of the Miyazaki problem (the one he identified, not one he was guilty of): most people writing commercial fiction base their ideas not on reality or even a broad and diverse swathe of previous material, but on existing commercial fiction, and mostly just the really recent and/or really popular stuff—a couple weeks ago I blanched at an article on TikTok readers that implied books that didn’t come out in the last couple years are somehow “old.”
This game of telephone results in writing so recursive, so out of touch that all traces of genuine thought, feeling, or imagination are expunged. It’s tropes all the way down.
Interesting attempt at answering a really complex and multifaceted problem. I’d really recommend the Designer Notes interviews with Amy Hennig for some fascinating first-hand insight from a writing lead on a series of cinematic games that were generally celebrated for their stories and storytelling.
One observation that’s particularly relevant to this discussion is that actually, yeah, even when they made a point of getting the script down first, they still sometimes had to make extensive changes to the story mid-development – which meant tearing down and throwing away work, rebuilding levels, rescripting and reanimating cutscenes, and flying voice actors back in at short notice. Giving story such prominence in development actually seems to be one of the reasons Naughty Dog have an endemic problem with crunch (something she gets asked about at one point and clearly struggles to rationalise/defend).
(Obviously there are studios who put way less focus on story that also get mired in crunch, for different reasons. All I’m saying is this aligns with Shamus’ view that caring about story introduces a big difficulty modifier, which is maybe why a lot of people evidently don’t bother).
You beat me to it! I can’t plug the Designer Notes podcast hard enough. The Hennig interview is a particularly good one.
Tangent, but I’ve been thinking about a similar issue recently with Game of Thrones, which had an infamous “Bran becomes King and a we’ll elect our monarchs” moment that seems to come out of nowhere, which was allegedly from Martin’s story notes. In the books, there’s more of a recurring theme that Primogeniture-based ruling and inheritance kind of really, really sucks and the resulting system tends to grind down virtually everyone (especially women, who come in last in this system). There are a lot more examples in the books, but the show doesn’t have that kind of time, plus it also indulges in “Anyone can become ruler as long as they just murder the people in charge with no repercussions like this is a Mafia war” (Cersei/Sand Snakes/Ramsay, etc.) that tends to dilute the message a bit.
So, a system where there is a stable ruler who will have no children (to squabble over who gets their rule when they die) might actually be presented as an attractive alternative in the books, but in the show, it’s a thematic conclusion to something that isn’t set up as well as Shamus mentions here.
This is just me starting to speculate, so I’m sure there’s room for adjustments in this theory. I’m as curious as anyone why “King Bran” will be a plot point.
This was a consequence of D&D severely altering or cutting out storylines from the books to fit them into the show only for it to be a bad idea in hindsight because they were setting up major plot points down the line.
Lots of stuff like the really weird and dark details about Bran’s abilities, the general shadiness and unknown motives of the COTF and Bloodraven (who is implied to not be the same as the Three Eyed Crow in the books), and the nature of the Weirdwoods as a sentient hivemind are not in the show but probably should have as they will probably lead to King Bran.
To add some anecdotes Peter Watts is a sci-fi author of some reputation, he was bought on for the expansion of Homeworld and was promptly let go so that the game designer’s SO could have a go at writing. That’s one for the Dunning-Kruger theory of writing being looked at as essentially insignificant
He then wrote the novelisation for Crysis 2 however from his words he never added a word to the script. That was Richard Morgan (a sci-fi author of a bit more success) and apparently he could only add words to a completed game
I suspect that second anecode is why games are now full of Whedon-ism, joking around gameplay conventions and people talking about the stupid things they’re about to. Writers can’t write a consistent personality that deals with all the designers ideas so they write a self-aware guy who’s stupid and knows it and hope they can write them well enough to get out of the massive structure issues they have to deal with
Holy shit, Peter Watts was brought on initially to work on Crysis 2? That’s insane. Blightsight is one of my favorite sci-fi novels. I’ve mentioned it several times in the comments section of Shamus’s Prey articles, since it was obviously a huge influence on that game.
I’d say, he made a good job with Crysis 2 novelization. I enjoyed writing of this book more than that game itself.
Blindsight is awesome, I’m in agreement here
Am I too late to jump in the Peter Watts is great bandwagon?
It’s not exclusive to games. Movies and TV shows do this sort of thing all the time, and it goes from jarring all the way to infuriating. It’s like writers think they can overcome their complete lack of imagination by directly pointing out the flaws with the story in a wink-wink moment, as if saying “Hey, isn’t this just silly? Yeah, we know how silly it is, just like you do.” somehow excused the writers from actually having to come up with competent storytelling.
Here are a few examples off the top of my head:
– In Ant-Man and The Wasp, Scott (Ant-Man) watches Wasp fly around shooting bad guys and tells Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man and suit designer for him and Wasp) “Wings and blasters? So I guess you didn’t have that tech available for me”, to which Hank replies “No, I did”, and that’s the end of the conversation. This is treated as a joke by the movie, but it also highlights the fact that there’s no excuse for Ant-Man’s suit not to have those advantages as well. It would have been very simple to come up with an explanation (such as having blasters and wings somehow interfered with the ability to control ants).
– In Season 3 or 4 of Arrow, Laurel Lance goes to ask her father Quentin for help, telling her that the villain of the season is about to lay a massive attack the city, to which he responds something to the effect of “A lunatic villain is trying to destroy the city? It must be May!”, which points fun at the fact that there’s always a city-threatening event happening in the last couple of episodes, something that works well for storytelling purposes (having the major threat happening at the end of the season) but is unjustifiable in terms of plausibility (the fact that whatever events happen throughout the season always culminate with a massive villain attack in the middle of May for each one of these series every year goes way past coincidental). This is really hard to justify, so you really shouldn’t be pointing it out.
– The very first episode of Masters of the Universe: Revelations has Skeletor mocking Sorceress for easily falling into his trap of pretending to be captured by a fake He-Man, but the story makes no attempt at justifying why she fell for it when she absolutely should have been able to notice all of the red flags on the scene that were obvious to the audience, who, unlike her, doesn’t have telepathic abilities or magic shields. If you’re going to point out that your plot only works because of a character’s dumb actions, then find a reason to justify them that doesn’t make them look like an idiot.
– In Mortal Kombat (2021), Sonya strikes a deal with Kano by telling him she’ll give him a million dollars if he guides them to Raiden’s temple. He points out that the idea of her having a million dollars is ridiculous, to which she doubles the price. Then he accepts and behind his back she reveals to Cole that of course she doesn’t have that kind of money. So all the characters on the scene point out that this woman who lives in a cheap house in the middle of nowhere can’t possibly have the kind of money she offers, but the deal is accepted anyway for no other reason that the plot needs to move forward. Again, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if you had Kano foolishly accept it upfront or reveal later that he was playing the fool because he had ulterior motives rather than point out the implausibility of the situation before straight doing it.
These are all cases of writers realizing there are problems with their story, but rather than doing the sensible thing and correct them or at least have enough presence of mind not to call attention to them they directly point an arrow at them and laugh, expecting the audience to do the same, which is kind of like a student trying to get sympathy by cracking jokes about how much they didn’t study in the middle of an exam’s answer.
This is itself a trope, called Lampshading, which is a trope that I believe Shamus actually quite likes much of the time because it allows the writer to point out that they understand how silly it is but to implore us to ignore it, which then allows us to trust that the writer knows what they’re doing and that hopefully later it will either be paid off or won’t matter.
I’ve only seen the first one, but the sense I got from that scene was that it WAS a joke, in the same vein as all the other shots in both movies at Scott being the buttmonkey and so not getting what he, at least, felt he deserved. The comment from Hank seemed to me aimed at referencing the fact that in the first movie he didn’t really trust or like Scott all that much (or anyone, actually), but needed him. So the Fridge Logic here was that I think that that was also the original configuration of the suits, and so Janet had the wings and Hank didn’t (like in the comics) but then there the explanation of “didn’t know how to do that yet” would have worked. So I don’t see that one as being all that bad.
For the others, with the caveat that I haven’t seen the scenes or the entire works:
The Arrow one is a common lampshade that’s been used in a lot of works, and is usually aimed mostly as a fourth wall breaking joke. Narratively, that the villain’s plans build towards and culminate to a final crisis at the end of the season makes sense and isn’t a problem that needs to be fixed. We would think that people in the universe would note it, but as we watch it that’s more of a Fridge Logic moment than a real, serious problem. So the joke here reflects that and isn’t meant to be taken seriously, and in general there’s no real problem to be fixed or that can be fixed (other than not running your seasons in “real-time”).
The Masters of the Universe one, I admit, is a bad one, especially in the first episode, unless it’s used later as a character point. The reason, for me at least, is that if the Sorceress can’t defend her actions then you start to define the character as an idiot. So either there would be some other trait that causes her to fall “stupidly” into the trap, or else she would have had another plan that would then turn the tables on the mocking Skeletor, where he thought he succeeded there because he was clever or she was stupid and it turned out she was just thinking ahead.
I agree with you on the Mortal Kombat one. The way you present it, it sounds like either he’s an idiot or else he had an ulterior motive and wasn’t after the money at all, because as you present it he called her out on not having the money and her simply doubling it shouldn’t have changed that. You COULD pull that off by having her use the doubling it as part of a bluff — “Would I be stupid enough to offer a killer one million dollars if I didn’t have it? Or double it to two million if I had to worry about money here?” — but that doesn’t sound like what happened.
But then this seems to align with what I’ve said about a lot of works, and what Shamus said in his post: thinking that the use of a trope is sufficient without understanding what needs to be done to make the trope work. Lampshading can be effective, but you have to do more than simply point out something that is clearly odd and wink at the audience, but have to do it in such a way that the audience believes the idiocy, in the end, is worth it.
The Arrow one can work… if it make sense in universe. The first time I saw it it was done on Buffy; the line was “Dawns’s in trouble. Must be Tuesday.” Guess which day of the week Buffy aired at the time.
But Tuesday is often shorthand for ‘day that ends in y,’ a reading already popularized by Raul Julia’s final movie. It’s entirely in character for Buffy to express her disgust that this happened, again, by referencing a cheesy action flick.
I get your point. However the Antman one isn’t a good example. There’s a very good reason. Hank Pym doesn’t like Scott enough to let him have the best stuff. And he wants Scott to know that. It’s characterization. Plus it’s funny.
I’ve used “No, I did” when I’ve been asked a leading question like that myself in real life. I completely understand the sentiment.
This. It’s not lampshading the fact that the Ant-Man suit doesn’t have wings or blasters, it’s providing an in-universe reason for it. It’s characterization for Hank Pym, and fits with his persona established over the previous movie and start of this one of being cantankerous, not given to social niceties, and disliking/distrusting Scott even while needing his help to accomplish his own goals. (And to be fair, the movies show he clearly has some good reasons to be paranoid with how important and dangerous the Pym particles are.)
This is something I’m not just wondering about video games.
You have movies and tv shows with a budget of millions of dollars that have really poor writing.
Like later seasons of GoT, Batman v Superman, Prometheus, etc..
With the salaries a big name actor gets you should be able to hire a decent writer.
Less excuse for films, but TV shows often have the problem (unless they’re short miniseries) that they have additional constraints that make it harder to tell a good story, like video games but in different ways.
Actors’ availabilities can cause story problems. In GoT that you mentioned, characters like Margaery were killed because of the actors needing to do other projects, and yet you also had unnecessary inserted scenes with even different sets of characters (like Theon) to give them something to do to justify retaining them before the point where you really need them.
There’s also marketing decisions that afflict many different shows to increase the role of fan favorite characters beyond the purpose that best suits the story or to drag out certain stories because the show is bringing in the eyeballs, etc.
All kinds of reasons why the writing could be terrible. At least films tend to have the advantage of relatively short shooting schedules and a more or less singular vision of one person (director) even if they do have some studio interference that makes good writing harder to pull off than books.
I want to bring attention to Diablo 3. I remember a few interviews by Blizzard devs back in the day about the story.
According to them, there was a real focus on story during development. That they knew players were going to see it again and again and again ad nauseam. Therefore Blizzard very deliberately put story at the forefront of their priorities for Diablo 3. They deflected criticism about other aspects of the game because they focused more on the story. That was their version of events and they stuck to it. And I actually believe them.
Thing is… Diablo’s 3 story is trash. It’s barely coherent and only if you look at each part in isolation. The villains are incompetent mustache twirling caricatures from the worst of Sat morning cartoons. All the characters are one dimensional with just stupid dialogue. They are paper thin to further the bare aspects of the plot (go here, do that) and nothing else. It would be not be a good story in most cases. It’s serviceable to get you pressing buttons and you can ignore it. However they have repeatedly claimed the focus was on the story during development! It was not intended to be throwaway drivel. When asked about how bad the story was years later, this is what they had to say:
How can that be someone’s job (their old finished job) and still defend it? Diablo 2 was a pulpy story about heroes fighting demons. Diablo 3 was not that. It’s not pulpy for the ‘Lord of Lies’ to be bad at lies. Or the entire character introduction and Nephilim thing being an unimportant side note. Or the best commander of Hell to tell you his plans, plus what he’s doing right now. Gloating how he’s tricked you before you’ve discovered it. All just makes him look like a buffoon with crappy dialogue. Because that’s exactly what he was.
I remember playing the game and listening to all this dialogue that I thought were traps and tricks. That there was going to be a twist. Nope. Everyone was playing it straight with hammy acting as spice. Diablo 3’s writer (Chris Metzen) wrote Frozen Throne 9 years before. That was an enjoyable story. I don’t know how Blizzard can’t tell the difference. Even with years to think about it.
Random D3 gripe that actually swirled around in my head in the last 24 hours:
Which dolt decided that the Dark Wanderer/Warrior from D1 needed to be retconned into a royal heir with a personal connection to the goings-on in Tristram’s cathedral? There is a lot wrong with the writing of D3, and this isn’t even the worst example. But in addition to Blizzard’s writing dropping into juvenile territory, I also hate their insistence on filling in blanks that need not be filled. At least not with anything so boring and trite.
Even his retconned name sucks.
Agree 100%.
Not everything has to be connected to everything else.
The more you try to connect every little thing together, the smaller the world of your story becomes.
That’s one of the things I love about the story in The Ur-Quan Masters: it’s chock full of throw-away references to significant historical events, planets, even entire species (possibly extinct!) that will never come up again beyond one or two mentions in passing. They’ll never be relevant or important to the story. But it’s like Tolkien’s legendarium: it gives this feeling of being in a universe just bursting with all kinds of fascinating things to discover that are just beyond the horizon, that there’s so much more beyond the story you’re experiencing, that you’re less the main character around which the universe revolves and more just a person who happens to luck into a massive adventure.
Seriously, I can’t gush enough about the writing in Star Control 2/The Ur-Quan Masters.
Heh! I was thinking about Ur-Quan Masters too while reading this post and listening to the related Diecast section. I didn’t mention SC2 due to its age. I’m so glad I’m not the only here who holds it up as an example of great writing. I think it is #2 of the best written games ever. Beaten only by Katawa Shoujo, a very very different game.
Hmm. That makes me wonder. What are everyone else’s top written games? Not simply good- but the best – by your own standards?
I remember that part about the kid demon guy (can’t remember his name) who is supposedly trying to trick you and yet he’s so bad at it despite being the master of deceit. At the “reveal”, even the player characters are fully aware that he’s trying to trick them, so the writers must have realized how badly they failed.
It’s not played for a humorous lampshade hanging either, it’s just a really badly written “Haha, I tricked you!” plot that falls flat on its face. Really bizarre, and as you said, you keep waiting for the plot twist that never comes.
Absolutely agree.
At one point during my first D3 campaign I noticed antagonists had started calling my character “Nephilim”, it seemed pretty important and I wondered if I had missed some cutscene or dialog about that.
When I played the campaign again, I made sure to find when that bit was revealed, and I couldn’t.
From one moment to the next, the player character is a descendant of a mythical race of semi gods and everyone is aware of it, but it does not figure in the plot at all.
OK, so, as a fanboy of the Diablo universe as a background (NOT of the D3 story, to be clear, it’s absolute dross and has destroyed/retconned/etc most of what made the world interesting):
The Worldstone was created as a way of keeping the Nephalem powers in check. The Nephalem lost their powers and eventually became humans. Most of this is found in Diablo 2 and LoD, it’s mostly repeated in the books and story snippets found in Acts 4 and 5.
After the destruction of the Worldstone at the end of LoD, the powers began to grow again. D3 takes place 20 years later, and supposedly “some” of the children born after the destruction have once again started gaining Nephalem powers. Surprise surprise, these are the main characters in Diablo 3. They’re the first generation to exhibit these powers again.
How or why the Barbarian also displays these powers is up for debate, AFAIK. He was first supposed to be the same Barb as in D2, in which case it could be argued that he was there at the destruction of the Worldstone and got his powers that way – this doesn’t quite work for the female Barb as in D2, you couldn’t choose the gender of your character. Anyway, canon-wise, it was “a band of heroes” who defeated Baal. Presumably only the Barb is still interested in adventuring, or something.
The diverse bunch of other Nephalem you encounter (with the exception of Kalmor) are spirits (Urshi, Orek, etc) of the older Nephalem who want to help/train you. Some of the other “former” Nephalem are those considered as the Ancestors/Ancient ones/(half-)Gods by different cultures: Bul-Kathos, Rathma, Esu, etc. In all, these are mostkly benevolent and want to help you regain your powers to be able to protect Sanctuary.
The revelation that the main character is a Nephalem, their powers are growing, etc, is told by Tyrael, further reinforced by some of the other Angels, expounded on in a whole bunch of the books found in Adventure mode, and the simple appearance of the city of Corvus itself is proof that you are a Nephalem.
I was hoping someone would bring up D3 while on this subject. I’m currently playing D2 Resurrected and enjoying it, and I stopped to think some on why I like D2 so much while I can’t even bare the thought of installing D3.
Part of the issue, I think, is that for a game that is built around replayability, there is an awful lot of “haha – I tricked you” going on –
Act 1 – Haha, I tricked you to leave Deckard Cain unprotected
Act 2 – Haha, I tricked you for some reason and I am also the lord of lies
Also Act 2 – Haha, I tricked you to give me the black soulstone so I can summon Diablo in Leah’s body
Act 3 – Haha, I tricked you and my army is breaking through the backside of your keep
Act 4 – I don’t remember actually
Act 5 – I bought this at a big discount and played the extra act through exactly once
Cain and Leah are good people. We’ve played through 2 games before in which Cain was a big help. Leah is voiced by Jennifer Hale (femshep), so she automatically gets a massive sympathy bonus. But when I am forced into being stupid and play along with the evil plans – every playthrough – that I know is leading to these characters dying, I want to strangle the writer.
Then we have the whole “NEPHALEM, I see you deafeated ${previousGroupOfMooks}, you will never defeat ${nextGroupOfMooks}!”. That sort of crap only serves to make the bad guy weaker. The prime evils (and their lesser ilk) should be above that sort of thing. It’s like if Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep would call up a protagonist: “You will never find the artifa.. oh, you already did. Hum. Well then, you will never figure that it should be placed at the altar of Gnapholoruk to stop the coming apocal.. Damn. *click*”
The protagonist should not merit the attention of a prime evil. You should not make the uber bad guy relatable. They are not human. Any attempt to attribute them with human qualities and weaknesses only lessens their.. impetus?
In D2, you never stopped any plans. You always arrived too late. Andariel had laid waste to the monastery and the Dark Wanderer gotten through. Dark Wanderer let out Baal and you were too late. Diablo emerged and went back to hell. You killed Diablo, but Baal wasn’t there. You destroyed Baal, but not before he did what he set out to do. That’s clever. That shows that, while you are strong enough to defeat the prime evils, you could not stop them from carrying out their plans. In D3, you are always there at the forefront as it happens.
Oh, and on the Nephalem issue. As I understand it, all humans are Nephalem – half angel, half demon. The games never explained why we as the protagonist was strong enough to defeat the prime evils, when all humans in theory would.
I suddenly got an idea about a theoretical diablo game where you play as a demon in hell, and hell is being invaded by humans who are all stronger than the average demon.
I approve that you have a screenshot from Rage 2 in this article, since its opening was so bad and cliche that I actually returned it after about fifteen minutes. (Also, the performance was terrible on my aging i5 2500k/ R9 380).
Writing is hard to evaluate in games. Take Dishonored 2, which doesn’t nail the execution of its main plot. As Corvo/Emily, you’re supposed to be motivated to take down Delilah and her cabal, but you later find out that Delilah has a pretty decent claim to the thrown, and unlike Emily (who is probably the better choice as the player character), she hasn’t been negligent in her governance, leading to the very uprising that usurps her. As you explore Karnaca, you discover that Emily is sort of responsible for all the dysfunction that she witnesses, considering she was the Empress. By the end of the game it is clear that Delilah is a sociopath, but I didn’t really want Emily or Corvo to take control again, having bore witness to their incompetence as rulers.
However, the little story tidbits we get in Dishonored are all very interesting and serve to build the world as well as the mood. Arkane flopped the execution of their main story, but they are talented writers when it comes to the smaller-scale stuff. Compare them to Bethesda’s Skyrim, which is completely devoid of any decent writing, and I’ll take a game with a crummy plot but great worldbuilding over a game that can’t do either.
It’s similar in Deathloop, the main plot isn’t all that impressive and even quite a bit confusing but the dialogue, specifically the exchanges and banter between Colt and Julianna, is fun and enjoyable.
Yeah, I’m playing through Deathloop and I’m pretty lost on the main story. Arkane is great at worldbuilding; linear storytelling, not so much.
You may like the 10-part Rage 2 Retrospective on this very site: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=48844
I felt there was an implication by the end of Dishonored 2 that, having seen first-hand what her poor governance would lead to, Emily would then do a much better job after taking control back from Delilah (who was not fit to rule because of her sociopathy, despite her underlings generally doing an okay job). But it was never spelled out in so many words.
In Dishonored 2’s defense, I think the game does a good enough job showing that Delilah is terrible for the job (she’s a thuggish impulsive cult leader with just enough plotting skill to take the throne and no governing skill whatsoever once she has it), and that Emily is a better fit.
Especially if you go for the low-chaos path, in which case there’s a decent narrative where you’re gathering allies from all corners of society to rule Karnaca when you leave.
But yeah, Delilah isn’t the best villain. On the other hand, the Duke is great: the speaker system means you get to hear him in every level, he’s just unlikable enough to make you look forward to taking him out, without making him look cartoonish, and his non-lethal mission is easily the best in the series. I think the story could have built up Delilah similarly if it had peppered more of her statues in each level.
Typolice:
Should be “we’d be”.
Should be “in the end”.
Should be “in this”.
For Life Is Strange, Square Enix was the publisher, but DontNod Entertainment was the developer. Tomb Raider was likewise developed by Crystal Dynamics. Nier: Automata was developed by Platinum Games.
Their first-party games are mostly RPGs – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, etc – so I guess you can still say they’re doing fine with writing.
The good Tomb Raiders were from Crystal Dynamics. The bad ones from Eidos Montreal. But Crystal Dynamics gave us Marvel Avengers sooo … meh.
The good Tomb Raiders were by Core Design and published by Eidos. The bad ones were everything else.
Anniversary was great. Legend and Underworld were good entrys.
Final Fantasy’s writing in mainline titles have been in a hard decline for the better part of this century (I’ll grant that I’ve heard good things about, say, the VII remake but XIII and XV in particular are disasters)
I’ve heard good things about DQ, though.
There are certainly lots of unique challenges in writing for video games, and a lot of bad writing is built on how the business is structured. Writing is treated as a side element to be ‘fitted’ into the game post-hoc in many titles. In others, it’s done by people whose talents lie elsewhere. And none of this is exactly a new phenomenon, either.
But all this doesn’t really get to the heart of Leslee’s question: is videogame writing getting worse?
Frankly, this question requires a much greater breadth of experience than I have. I too bemoan the loss of the classic storytellers of Bioware and Black Isle…but have new talented storytellers risen to take their place, in games I’ve not yet experienced? Has my ability to detect bad writing simply got better the older I get? For some people, have their gaming habits gone further into genres that don’t typically value good writing?
So many factors.
I don’t think game writing has gotten worse, I think game scope has gotten bigger so as to allow for greater amounts of bad writing in a single game. Code Name: Viper’s story wasn’t any good either, but it was limited to like, a single screen at the end of each level, because the NES didn’t have room for more.
Yes.
Shamus made a point several years ago when talking about StarCraft about how the writing in older games can be handwaved as being shorthand due to limitations of the medium but then when you use increased technology to improve the visual medium then the writing looks absurd.
Some of the earlier Final Fantasy titles can look really bad if done with modern cutscene technology, for example.
This is certainly an element of it. Who knows how the original StarCraft’s storytelling would be remembered if it was doled out with the modern glitz and fanfare that’s common these days*. It’s a useful distinction – the story itself versus its delivery. But if the constraints on the delivery at the time actually felt like it improved the story, then I’ll say ‘close enough’ and just say the game has a good story, period. Same thing for a really good voice actor that elevates a role above its stature.
To take an example from another Blizzard title – did Diablo 2 have a good story? There isn’t much of one, honestly. And you’re only really exposed to it during cinematics and the occasional NPC exposition. It just looms distantly over the player while you mop up the mess left in the Dark Wanderer’s wake. And yet that restraint made all the story bits more memorable, the isolation of the player more palpable, and there’s no room for bullshit to be thrown in and stretch it out. And so even if the story only made up a tiny fraction of the game time, it left an oversized impact on me, and I still get chills watching some of the cinematics on Youtube today. All in all: yeah, pretty good story!
If you were to remake D2 today, but then throw in 5x more cinematics, 10x more in-engine cutscenes, and 30x NPC dialogue, then the story of D2 will look frankly ridiculous and overwrought. But then I don’t think you’re telling D2’s story any more – you’re doing something else.
*I will maintain that SC1’s writing still holds up. It’s pulpy sci-fi space opera that wears its influences on its sleeves, and none of that is meant as a pejorative. The emotional thrust of it and Brood War’s campaign (particularly the latter) shines true and throughout, with multi-dimensional characters that have actual arcs, and no pandering that I can recall. I know there are people who claim that the story wasn’t actually good and it would have been more obvious to the audience if used all the modern storytelling amenities that SC2 had, but I have to strongly disagree. You could pull the scripts from both games and just compare the dialogue of characters like Raynor and Mengsk, and it will become exceedingly obvious that they are husks of their former selves. It’s like Metzen completely forgot who these people were and where they were by the end of Brood War. Mengsk’s treatment is particularly infuriating, devolving from a charismatic yet duplicitous villain of intelligence into one-note space fascist.
The early Final Fantasy games also had a lot of issues with localization/translation (which is another wrinkle in the writing process.) It’s not just that the writing had problems, but also that it looked very different to US audiences than it did to Japanese players.
There certainly have been games praised for their writing above all else, like Undertale and Disco Elysium. Whether they measure up to the Old Greats is a matter of personal opinion.
I also think gaming as a medium is just hostile to telling a story well if you’re not taking advantage of the unique things gaming has to offer. Most games are very clearly divided into two halves – the game and the movie. The game is where you shoot things, the movie is where you get storytelling. Imagine sitting down to watch a movie, but every 2-5 minutes you have to pause it and go running for an hour. That story’s going to be ruined even if it’s well written. Now, on top of all this, the writer doesn’t have control over the movie’s structure. That hour you’ve spent running around? In that time, the characters in the movie have also been running around. They’ve suddenly moved from a Nazi underground secret lab to a volcano, they’re now fighting a big lava monster, and the writer has to explain why. No matter how good your writer is and how hard they’re trying, getting something coherent out of those conditions, yet alone something good is going to be next to impossible. I think that’s why almost all the games that are usually cited as having good stories are either incredibly cutscene-heavy (something like the way Hideo Kojima does his storytelling, though I have my reservations about calling his stories great, or the old BioWare style with small branching choices) or in some way merge the storytelling and the gameplay (be it in the Telltale adventure game style, where a big part of the gameplay IS interacting with the writing, or something like the environmental storytelling of Half-Life 2).
This conflict premise also ties in well with Shamus’ point about how critical proper setup is. In particular, the priorities of the beginnings of games are less geared toward plot goals and more toward mechanical ones- a modern AAA looter-shooter simply can’t spend the requisite time/effort on properly establishing a setting, characters, and plotline, and this cascades into plot failure. Even attempting to do so would cause its own set of issues, e.g. alienating the intended audience when their engagement is most critical.
Yeah, it seems that games trying to tell a cinematic story ends up just telling a story without using what is games’ characteristic, the interactivity between the player and the medium: they try to make a movie out of a game, usually failing at both, making a bad game and a bad movie.
The explanation is much simpler, and you can see evidance of it right in this article. There’s no culture of writing appreciation in gaming culture, so most people don’t even know what it looks like. Take this article for instance, what are the examples of good writing? Matrix, Star Wars and Marvel (lol). Take a guess how many people involved in gaming even read books, and then count how many of those people read literature. How many constructive references are going to be made to Star Wars and Superhero Movies and how many are going to be made to arthouse or classic films?
How can you expect good writing emerge from a culture where no one knows what it looks like?
Note that when I selected Matrix, Star Wars and Marvel, I did so because I wanted works that are more or less universally understood and generally appreciated. I was not holding them up as the “best”, but as the the most well-known and inoffensive. I was trying to make the point to the reader that “The stories you like also use blunt tropes, and that’s okay.”
When writing an article like this, there’s a real danger of it coming off as snobbery. If I hold up a few games that I think are “the best” writing, then I’ll get pushback from people who think some OTHER games deserve the crown of “best”. Then I’ll spend the entire comment thread defending my games, and my actual thesis will get lost in the fray.
This ain’t my first rodeo, and I knew better than to do that.
I understand that people on the Internet can be vicious and I think you’re treading the line well, but the fact you’d need to defend yourself from accusation of “snobbery” even on your own website I think makes my point, there’s a enormous cultural problem in gaming and its proximity to general nerd culture and nerd culture’s almost pathological aversion to “high art” (for the lack of a better term). Which isn’t to say discussions about literature can’t be infantile and silly, but if someone names Kafka or Orwell or Tolstoy or whoever as a good writer, there’s a general acceptance that even if a person doesn’t personally like it, there’s a definite quality to them that’s universally accepted, or at least not needlessly in suspicion. Personally I didn’t like Mrs Dalloway at all, but I wouldn’t protest someone refering to Virginia Woolf as a good writer.
In fact I think your examples might be better than I expected because until culture changes, can we even expect game writing to be better than Star Wars or The Matrix? Does anyone expect it to? Does anyone even want it to? I often find myself wondering what people ultimately want out of “good writing”, but I think it would ultimately mean going away from Escapism, Franchises, Commercialization and the constant retreat from the real world into comfortable Fantasy, Sci-Fi kill-the-bad-guys type of stories.
I think there are two questions we can ask, “Why isn’t the writing as good as in Pirates of the Caribbean?” Which is a fine question, it’s a great movie and the script is fun and tight, it’s genuinely difficult to write an adventure story as well as Pirates of the Caribbean, especially within Hollywood. We can also ask “Why isn’t the writing as good as in Solaris?” and the answer to that is that Solaris simply can’t be replicated within Hollywood (though ironically it was tried) because the culture isn’t there, it isn’t what Hollywood does, but it *can* be made outside Hollywood, and frequently is.
My problem is that the entire gaming culture seems like one big Hollywood, even the indie scene, and the games which don’t amount to Escapism are insignificantly few. Gaming culture is also far more consolidated. Western Europe is culturally indistinguishable from the US and Canada, and the Japanese scene is culturally tied with the anime and manga culture, which is similarly escapist in nature. Eastern Europe is allowed its own cultural expression and you can see that many many games which *feel* Eastern European (Witcher, Stalker, Metro, Pathologic, This of of Mine etc.).
America’s culture is pretty firmly embedded in indivisualism, so games dealing with the actual problems in the world aren’t going to do as well. That’s pretty much going to leave you with escapist media.
Every culture has escapist media, and there are an enormous amounts of American literature and films which deal with the real world. You could possibly argue American culture is the most obsessed with Escapism, which might be true (though I have no idea how you’d measure that), but that doesn’t say much. New Hollywod in the late ’60s to late ’70s and HBO from early 2000’s to early 2010’s were fantastic periods for creativity in American culture, some of the best writing in the world at the time was produced there, so I don’t buy it.
Edit: Chinese society is fairly collectivist (as far as I know) but if you look beyond their best filmmakers (Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan, Chen Kaige etc) a lot of it is terible fantasy nonsense, which is what you’d expect.
I think the problem here is we’re not exactly looking for the best of the best, nor does something have to be the best in order to be good. You know what’s considered literature today? Canterbury Tales. You know what’s in Canterbury Tales? Fart jokes. Similarly, even though we consider works like The Iliad and The Odyssey lofty classics of the ancient world, they were still written in rhyme that could be memorized and passed on so that the audience could resonate with it.
There’s nothing wrong with something being good enough to have strong, broad appeal while still failing to be striving for the most lofty forms of art. One of the reasons works like Star Wars and the (original) Matrix are easy to grasp at is that they do what they set out to do really well while simultaneously resonating on a large spectrum. It makes for a useful metric by which to get your broadest audience to understand.
Is 2001: A Space Odyssey a better film than Star Wars? Depends on how you define it. It’s not as fun as Star Wars, but it’s not trying to be. I’d say it’s a great exercise in narrative and visually thematic cohesion, and watching it repeatedly is rewarding so long as you know what you’re studying. But for a lot of folks, a contemplation on mankind’s evolution and our lack of preparedness for outer space (and then some) is probably not the ideal way to wind down after a hard week of work.
One of the issues with works that are often considered “great” is that they are also often more and more impenetrable. You can call it a depreciation of good art or writing by the modern audience, but in 1968 much of the audience for 2001 would leave confused and reception would be mixed. I’m sure we could say the same for a lot of films that cross that threshold between “good” and “great”, just in case 2001 doesn’t happen to be your fancy. But, again, Beowulf is also considered literature of modern times, but if we look at it in the context of its era, was it really? Or was it just the Star Wars of its time? Same with the legend of King Arthur.
Perhaps this idea of “great” art being more substantial than broadly successful works like Star Wars and the Matrix could just be a sort of post-industrial society snobbery (that, admittedly, I myself am a victim to). I mean, before the industrial revolution, or perhaps even the great enlightenment, did folks really care that much about these things? I suppose it’s possible you’d hear debates about how Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was utter drivel compared to the deep and meaningful Macbeth, but something tells me there weren’t many in the long run that cared.
Canterbury Tale isn’t well regarded *because* of the fart jokes, it’s great writing which happens to have fart jokes in it, there’s never been any (serious) attempt to suggest great literature can’t have humor in it, half of Shakespeare’s plays are outright comedies, what’s your point there?
“But for a lot of folks, a contemplation on mankind’s evolution and our lack of preparedness for outer space (and then some) is probably not the ideal way to wind down after a hard week of work.” You hit the nail on the head there, the *purpose* of different fictions are different indeeed. Literature does require much more from the reader which is why commercially it will never sell as well, and people are far less likely to engage with something that requires much more from them, especially if they’re exhausted from work. I’m not different here from anyone else.
On the other hand, when you do devote your concentration and thinking it’s also much more rewarding. It enhances your critical thinking and reading more, it’s more applicable to real life situations and issues, it stays in your head more and evolves the more and more you’re thinking about it. It’s also enhances your understanding of the medium and what can and can’t be done, how to play with expectations and can make you more deeply question internal beliefs and ideologies, and that of others.
What’s “better” is up to the individual what it means, but I think it’s pretty clear one has more staying power and staying value than the other. Which isn’t to say entertainment is something to be avoided or supplanted with literature, not at all. I love Pirates of the Caribbean, Casino Royale, Mad Max, Dredd, Die Hard, Hard Boiled etc. but when literature is deliberately avoided because it’s not as easy to ingest I think you’re missing out on a lot of the value art can provide.
When it comes to classical literature (Illiad, Oddysey, Aeneid, Beowulf, King Arthus, Tristan & Isolde etc.) they’re regarded as having cultural value moreso than aesthetic and psychological value. In a sense you could say they’re “The Star Wars of their time” but in modern society people don’t really read them to get an entertaining story, but rather insight into culturally important narratives written millenia ago, so I don’t think the comparison is particularly apt. That said Greek Plays like Antigone are obviously still great.
“Perhaps this idea of “great” art being more substantial than broadly successful works like Star Wars and the Matrix could just be a sort of post-industrial society snobbery (that, admittedly, I myself am a victim to). I mean, before the industrial revolution, or perhaps even the great enlightenment, did folks really care that much about these things?”
This is a pretty strange argument. It’s true that literary criticism as we know it doesn’t strand back through the annals of history, but a lot of our understanding and knowledge doesn’t. You mean if it’s more recent it’s less valid? People didn’t have a serious regard for democracy, equality or free thought before the enlightenment either, and Pacifism as we understand it was much more sparse before World War 1.
To be more specific, I do not disagree that there is merit or value in being able to study these things in cinema. However, what I was suggesting is that it’s a sort of “wealthy elite” notion to take what is luxury entertainment and assign a value to it based on those willing to devote extra time to its study. I do not say this with judgment, given that I love evaluating entertainment myself. However, the time one spends evaluating these films or stories or whatnot could equally be spent, say, working on one’s car in their garage. Or perhaps be spent planning a complete overhaul of a room in one’s house. Or maybe one would rather go down to the raceway for a drive, or go out running, or practice a martial art, or so on and so forth.
People are often multi-dimensional, but ultimately they tend to have limited specialties. Someone could be a master clay modeler with moderate guitar playing skills and painting capabilities. Sure, they enjoy watching movies or playing games, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to devote the time to watching and rewatching or reading and rereading media in order to “improve” upon it. Their mental faculties are instead devoted to learning more deeply of their chosen skills.
To put another way, despite having a lot of inspiration from classical compositions and other bands of a variety of natures, metal band Blind Guardian mentioned that they include melodies worth singing along to because it calls back to the German heritage of tavern songs. After a hard day’s work, laborers would gather for a drink and sing catchy, simple tunes that anyone could join in on. Are works of opera more complex? Or other classical compositions? Obviously, but that’s not the point.
The reason I emphasized enlightenment or industrialization is because there were far fewer people with the free time to contemplate the intellectual value of these entertainment luxuries. They were too busy working and doing all they could to simply survive. As time has progressed and the first world has become so progressively wealthy that one can earn a living simply discussing luxury entertainment, I feel like there’s a shift in skew.
In other words, your appreciation of King Arthur, Beowulf, etc. from a cultural perspective is only heightened in hindsight by its historical relevance. It doesn’t matter that people today don’t read them for entertainment purposes, because Star Wars and the Matrix and Marvel are providing that very same value. The only thing differentiating them from ancient classics is their age.
It probably sounds like I’m dragging down not only my own hobby, but what Shamus himself does. I’m not. But to go back to the original point, it’s actually better for Shamus to reference good works that resonate broadly and have withstood the test of time than it is to seek some intellectual’s interpretation of what is a truly “great” work. His purpose is to establish a benchmark from which the largest possible audience can agree, and to that end, he chose well.
In other words, if video games cannot amount to the “Star Wars of their time”, then they fall short even of the baseline “good” that these films all hit, let alone the works regarded by intellectuals as great.
“It doesn’t matter that people today don’t read them for entertainment purposes, because Star Wars and the Matrix and Marvel are providing that very same value. The only thing differentiating them from ancient classics is their age.”
This is very misleading, we’re not talking about a book written in the ’50s, we’re talking about stories written *millenia* ago, when things where unimaginably different to the degree we don’t actually have that many surviving examples of written narratives, so your claim that “it’s the same thing” is just a presumption. It’s obviously different in that the commercial aspect is completely different just to name one thing. We don’t actually know a huge amount of how people related to these works, all we have are the works. But I’m curious, have you read anything from ancient Greece? Plays or philosphy or whatever? If you haven’t, I guarentee you’ll be surprised by it and won’t treat it as “oh it’s just ancient Greek Star Wars”.
“But to go back to the original point, it’s actually better for Shamus to reference good works that resonate broadly and have withstood the test of time than it is to seek some intellectual’s interpretation of what is a truly “great” work.”
This is also backwards, literature is what has stood the test of time. Genre Fiction is what’s often fleeting and forgotten. Nowadays society is extremely connected and franchises have become to wealthy that producers can endlessly remind people of properties so they don’t become forgotten like most genre fiction. Would Star Wars be as relevant if the franchise had been abandoned after 83? I doubt it myself. Also a literary canon isn’t “some intellectual”, it’s an approximation of the old books that people are still reading and talking about.
“In other words, if video games cannot amount to the “Star Wars of their time”, then they fall short even of the baseline “good” that these films all hit, let alone the works regarded by intellectuals as great.”
I think you go much further here than I have. Things don’t progress from bad genre to good genre to art. A writer either sets out to write literature or genre (this is almost always a subconscious “decision”). You can’t just take a great genre film like Casino Royale, sprinkle some deep sounding dialogues, and suddenly it’s an arthouse film, it doesn’t work like that, it has a different goal. There are many terrible books which set out to write literature and they’re just facile and worthless, literature is more about the purpose of what the text sets out to do.
“This is also backwards, literature is what has stood the test of time.“
For this statement to work you must first prove that literature can be defined separately from “what has stood the test of time”, ideally by providing examples of literature that hasn’t and “genre fiction” that has.
Literature is text that is culturally important outside of commercial usage. Some is important because it’s managed to survive, some is important because it has content which is important, it’s not more complex than that. I’m curious, are you asking because you don’t know what literature is or because you don’t think it exists?
So in other words, literature just means good books, and your whole argument is circular?
From one point of view: essentially, yes. What gets into accepted into a canon is ultimately a subjective decision, after all. You can make your own canon, or you can accept someone else’s, but insisting other people accept yours (ie that an objective standard has been defined) is what gives humanities academics such a terrible reputation for snobbery (well, part of it anyway).
From another: it seems to me there are many ways in which broad consensus can be established on the quality of art. They’re just maddeningly difficult to grasp and articulate! This is what humanities academics (the less cynical ones, at least) are actually getting up to in their ivory towers.
Obviously I can’t cover every angle, but I’ll quickly gesticulate at a few. You can examine aspects of craftsmanship, point to technical or formal mastery in a work, but we seem to accept that this alone isn’t sufficient as an ultimate arbiter. Or you can frame things in terms of what works and doesn’t, what produces a desirable affect in the audience. This is what Shamus does so successfully in his analyses imo: he’s always trying to examine why the things he likes makes him like them. But of course the issue there is that no two audiences are alike, so the more elaborate the generalisation, the smaller the group for whom it will carry. Or you can put a work into the context (time, place, politics, etc etc) of its creation and build a case for its significance as a document or agent for change.
Or you can just stamp your feet and say that it’s obviously better because ((authority)) has said so and surely you can’t be seriously saying ((piece of low art)) is as good as ((piece of high art))???! Cringe cringe cringe omg you nerds are hopeless
God only knows where we’d be if humanities academics didn’t treat a lot of subjective stuff as objective. It’s not just a litcrit thing, or even restricted to art.
I’m also responding to Asdasd and eldomtom2 above, because I do feel like there’s circular thinking, or maybe stubborn thinking, at work here that they somewhat address.
I think this is something I can agree with, because I do feel like the study of media can help us better understand what makes a work good, but in order for that work to be good it must somehow resonate. In regards to ancient classics, yes, I have read Iliad, Odyssey, and Beowulf. I’ve also read Plato’s The Cave, though I wouldn’t call that a story. I am also familiar that there’s an ancient Greek story in which voyagers sail to the moon, so “science fiction” is pretty darn old.
But Paul, you’re intentionally trying to poke a hole in my argument in order to confirm a basic assumption: something is better because it is old. You’re using the fact that it is still read as evidence of it being “literature”. While we can study it to get an understanding of what the culture at the time cared about or how they perceived the world, I don’t think it stood the test of time strictly because a bunch of wealthy thinkers decided “now this is literature!” back in Greece.
Star Wars: A New Hope is a good movie, and there are several reasons ivory tower academics can point to and explain why, even if it comes to “people like an underdog” or something. It’s inspirational due to its heroism. It provides a believable protagonist that wants something more in life, and yet is reasonably hesitant to leave his current life and responsibilities behind… until it’s all forcefully taken away. Why was it taken away? For logical reasons that the film establishes by having the Storm Troopers seeking the Droids, learning of the moisture farm from the Jawas. On a logical and emotional level the writing works.
What you are also failing to address is the presumed importance of the value of studying narrative works. It’s honestly a very dangerous thought path to travel. Judging people based on how hard they think about a movie is all well and good until your “Check Engine” light comes on and you need someone to figure out how to fix your car because you were too busy watching movies.
Perhaps you could say “People reading a blog like Shamus’ are already more likely to enjoy thinking about their media”, which is true, but you still can’t predict what “higher grade” entertainment they might enjoy. Here’s an example: I really enjoy Straight Outta Compton. It’s a film that explores the conflict that arises when artistry, industry, and criminal life all clash together. Aspects of it resonate with me while also expanding my mind to other perspectives. I’m also fully aware that true events were twisted (often favorably for those being portrayed) for the sake of telling a story: Dr. Dre’s DUI is turned into a speeding incident inspired by his desire to run away from the gangster lifestyle in the record studio, which is also his desire to leave that lifestyle behind altogether.
Now, I just spent a paragraph discussing this film, but how many people reading this site have never seen the film? How many would be turned off by the language or nudity in the film? How many would enjoy it, but fail to enjoy it as much as Star Wars? How many dislike the film altogether?
Which is, again, the purpose of using something that is critically and culturally recognized as good. To look down upon it is, quite frankly, snobbery, and it is intellectually dishonest to dismiss its value for comparisons just because there may be a work you, personally, have deemed better, regardless of anyone else’s consensus.
I suppose, then, I will leave with one question: what films would you presume to select to make the same point? You’ve criticized Shamus’ choices, but offered no alternatives of your own. So let’s see if your choices can stand up to the same scrutiny. Offer some films and let’s see if they can share the same consensus, or if Shamus’ point would remain true: too many nit-picks in the comments that then drop away from the article’s original intent (just as this conversation has)?
“This is also backwards, literature is what has stood the test of time. Genre Fiction is what’s often fleeting and forgotten.”
Not necessarily. A lot of modern ‘literary’ fiction will get forgotten a lot faster than Lord of the Rings which is definitely ‘Genre Fiction’ as defined by those that are into ‘literary’ fiction. And by that I mean, your typical story that consists entirely of a conversation in a small apartment in New York. Or perhaps all the depressing stuff my sister had to read in third and fourth year English: pretty much all revolving around rape, incest, abuse (maybe child) and depression. I think that will all be forgotten because it’s literally only read by 3rd and 4th years in university. It’s ‘literary’ because it isn’t genre, but it lacks the staying power of actual classics like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy.
By contrast, I think the Star Wars (the originals) are here to stay despite being very genre. It tapped into something culturally that has some serious staying power. I think Matrix (the first) lasts for a long time too. I would not be surprised if both ‘stand the test of time’.
Well I don’t like high art because high art nowadays tends to be pretentious trash. If you want to make an “art film” about the plight of the poor, it can’t be about realistic things happening to realistic characters. It wouldn’t be an art film then.
I also question to some extent that there is a distinction between low and high art, as opposed to bad but popular art and good but unpopular art.
“If you want to make an “art film” about the plight of the poor, it can’t be about realistic things happening to realistic characters. It wouldn’t be an art film then.”
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. Florida Project was extremely realistic and widely praised. Same with Nomadland, Burning, Roma, Shoplifters, Winter’s Bone, An Elephant Sitting Still, Leviathan etc. Social Realism is a pretty tenacious style and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. In fact films about the poor which aren’t Social Realist I think is much more rare.
“I also question to some extent that there is a distinction between low and high art”.
I’m interested in how you would describe the difference between what, say Tom Clancy books are trying to accomplish vs stuff that, say Orwell writes.
No one would call those art films, and I doubt it would be hard to find someone who considers them “low art”.
“I’m interested in how you would describe the difference between what, say Tom Clancy books are trying to accomplish vs stuff that, say Orwell writes.”
What distinction are you drawing? I presume it can’t be one you can also draw between Orwell and, say, Shakespeare. Nor, considering my original post, can it be one of quality.
Everyone calls those art films, you seem to have confused art films with experimental films. Art films generally are films created outside genre conventions that investigate a central idea about the human condition, usually through a narrative drama.
Answer my second question. And no, no one is going to call an Oscar winner like Nomadland an art film.
Literary realism is a measly two centuries old. Give it time.
Probably a dumb idea to jump into this but here we go.
On the contrary, no one likes high art who isn’t a nerd.
Like with The Matrix, or Star Wars, or Marvel. It’s generally accepted that there’s a quality to them, even if you don’t like them.
You’re off by a mile. It’s an internally consistent story with a deliberate tone, at least one interesting character and a plot with good pacing and a reasonable ending. (And “internally consistent” is optional, look at Killer 7.) If I wanted to “go away from the constant retreat from the real world” I’d go outside and talk to the neighbors.
You’ve just given six examples of “The Star Wars of their time” surviving millenia. I don’t think it’s clear at all that any kind of work-for-it story would have more staying power.
If you’re talking about the reader changing more from the work-for-it stuff: I took more away from Lucas’ Star Wars than from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If you’re not willing to separate nerd culture from art culture I don’t see the point in even discussing things. You’re being incredibly dishonest if you can’t tell Video Games, Star Wars, Fantasy etc. have more connecting cultural tissue with each other than they do with Flaubert, Goethe or Melville.
I don’t even understand your claim here, that if you counted up Stalker, 8 1/2, Wild Strawberries and Star Wars you wouldn’t immediately notice a huge disconnect in style, tone, and what the film even attempts to achieve in the first place? That despite obviously being more difficult and more in-depth and experimenting with structure, prose, themes etc. you’ll get a fundamentally identical experience out of it? That an incredibly strange claim and I don’t even think you want to make it.
Also please stop saying “The Illiad was the Star Wars of its time”, that’s not remotely close to being accurate.
Well let’s quote you again.
Art culture is a subset of nerd culture, and a much smaller one than gaming culture. Once you step outside nerd culture, there’s no more art culture. Disprove this.
You’re being dishonest if you think Faust or Egmont has more connection to Moby Dick than it does to Fantasy.
So all great literary works must create an identical experience. Got it. Crime and Punishment and The Count of Monte Cristo are interchangeable.
What was this in response to, anyway? Was it me using your words to describe modern popular things, because your terminology was vague enough to do so? That was an invitation for you to clarify your point and offer a definition that doesn’t include Star Wars.
You’re jumping all over the place on this. First it’s “In a sense you could say they’re “The Star Wars of their time” “, then it’s “We don’t actually know a huge amount of how people related to these works”, and now it’s “not remotely close to being accurate.”
Fine, Robin Hood then. The Three Musketeers. Sir Lancelot. Perseus.
Art culture is not remotely a subset of nerd culture, is this a joke? Have you ever been to an art exhibition? You really think those people are really into Batman and anime? For gods sake man, you think gaming conventions and art exhibitions inhabit remotely similar cultural spheres? If you wanna extend the word “nerd” beyond what people actually use it for, that’s being dishonest, which is what I think you’re being. If you think people really into Fantasy are more likely to read Goethe than people really into Melville, Flaubert or whoever then you just don’t know what you’re talking about, and there’s no more point talking about it. The fact that you conflate millenia old folk tales (aside from randomly throwing in Three Musketeers there, which indeed is genre fiction, same with Count of Monte Cristo) with a modern commercial pastiche of ’50s pulp sci-fi made to sell toys to children and say they’re basically the same thing I think is argument enough.
I don’t think those people are into anything but social jockeying. That’s not “art culture”, that’s “snob culture”.
I read Faust and Egmont and thought they were fun. I read two chapters of Moby Dick and dropped it because it was a drag. Faust and Egmont have more to do with Fantasy than with Moby Dick. But you’ve shifted the metric again; now it’s not about any inherent property of the story, it’s about what people who read this will read. Except that isn’t it, because people who read Goethe are far more likely to read The Three Musketeers, but that one’s not literature, apparently. Over a hundred years old and still a household name, but it doesn’t count, not gonna say why. And Orwell is literature despite being much newer. (But I bet Ayn Rand isn’t.)
Let’s change it up and quote me this time.
And then I named old action stories. You’re the one who keeps saying they’re basically the same. Well, you’ve had plenty of chances to point out a single distinguishing factor, and you haven’t. Which means they’re basically the same.
Remember the starting topic? About how to write better video game stories? So far your metric has been “it has to be old”, which is impossible for a new work, and “art exhibitionists have to like it”, which isn’t going to happen for the same reason fantasy readers probably don’t read Goethe; it’s a videogame, and we already know those don’t fit in our circle so we’re not gonna try it. Which leaves us with:
Apparently no one knows what literature looks like. So it’s a terrible thing to aim for.
Tolstoy is a horrible graphomaniac, lol. I’m definitely considering anyone, that calls him a good writer, a snob
There are some unique challenges to writing for games, to be sure, but I’m fairly certain that the fundamental reason that so many AAA games have bad stories is that writing good stories is hard. Bad stories aren’t unique to games. I’m not convinced that the stories in AAA games are, on average, really any worse than the stories in big-budget movies. I am convinced, however, that a bad story in a game is more obnoxious than an equally bad story in a movie. I come to games to play them, not to watch them. To have my play constantly interrupted by a terrible story (or, sometimes, even a good story) is deeply irritating. I’m more bitter about bad stories in otherwise good games than I am about worse stories in films, and I suspect I am not unique in this.
For me it depends on the genre of game. In a movie, if the story is bad I’m going to be at least a bit irritated because the story is almost all there is (occasionally I’ll see something with enough spectacle to get over it for one viewing; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was all right when I saw it in IMAX on opening weekend, and I liked a lot of the ambience of Come True even if the story completely falls apart by the end). In a video game, as long as you let me play the game part I can often get over the terrible story parts in between. To use an example cited multiple times in this thread alone, I didn’t mind Diablo III’s plot at all. I hardly even remember it.
But games in genres where participating in the story is part of the appeal, such as RPGs? Bad stories there can fuck right off. Recent Bethesda games in particular stick in my craw here precisely because they tend to give dialogue options which means I’m not just sitting through but actively participating in the stupid. It’s certainly bad if the villain’s motivations don’t make sense, and even worse if the player character’s don’t, but if you’re going to do things like have someone falsely accuse me of a crime, then give me three dialogue options, none of which are “deny committing the crime” (something that actually happens in a Skyrim random encounter), then I struggle to imagine it even being possible for a movie to annoy me that much.
That’s interesting, and I think you could get into questions of various intrinsic and extrinsic motivators here. As I see it, story and reward-based gameplay loops are (can be) both a kind of extrinsic motivator, while the desire to experience moment-to-moment gameplay and what I’ll lazily term content (level design, character/weapon/moveset roster, etc) is more intrinsic. Players obviously have different preferences, but I suspect these aren’t iron-clad but will shift from game to game. I know I tell myself I’m unmoved by Diablo-style extrinsic reward loops, but in unguarded moments I like to watch progress bars fill, numbers go up and purple/orange loot spray everywhere up as much as anyone else.
Sidestepping the question of what is a bad story, I can find myself more forgiving of a bad or indifferent story if the other aspects are picking up the slack, or it at least isn’t getting in my face. As an example, the story for Goldeneye 64 is barely even coherent if you haven’t watched the film, but it never really bothered me as the game is just fun. But a bad enough story will still tarnish my impression of a game I would have otherwise enjoyed.
Chad Miller makes a good point that some games are primarily delivery vehicles for their story, and that failure here can serve to multiply the frustration when the player’s agency is strictly notional, in a way that is perhaps unique to the medium. See: the various Shocking Twists™ in Spec Ops, seeing them coming a mile away but not being able to do anything about it, and the endless subsequent lecturing for being a Horrible Person and, what, keeping going on the only path available instead of uninstalling the game?
For the record, I thought Diablo 3’s story was execrable, to the point where it actively distracted the part of my brain that was only there for the loot-hoovering with its badness.
The problem with writing in games is the same problem with writing in shows and writing in movies. The people teaching the new writers obviously are not doing a good job. Our society is less interested in analyzing an individual’s thoughts and motivations, it’s currently more interested in confirming broad narratives. Writers don’t want to communicate an idea to the audience, they want to make a reference to an idea they think the audience already has.
Also, not to go down the politics road, but communicating your own unique ideas runs the risk of people deciding your unique ideas (or their interpretations thereof) indicate you’re a bad person, while referring to an existing idea is a lot safer and predictable.
Good writing can challenge assumptions. Society is currently not very open to being challenged that way. Of course, good writing still exists, but its a little out of the mainstream.
Don’t worry, we’ll all simply live the interesting stories, as the planet continues its downward trend. Then we won’t even need writers! :D
Yes, but I was hoping more “post-scarcity Star Trek” and less “post-Apocalyptic cyberpunk”, was that so much to ask for?
That reminds of a point I had seen made by a video game writer (
Chris Avellone, maybe? Not sureedit: George Ziets, at the time at inXile): concerning stories that communicates ideas (dare I say “political” ideas), the quality of the end result might depends on what the writer set out to do: works where the writer set out to communicate an idea usually end up worse that works where the writer wanted to tell a story and the ideas ends up emerging naturally.“works where the writer set out to communicate an idea usually end up worse that works where the writer wanted to tell a story and the ideas ends up emerging naturally.”
Yes. The moment you set out to communicate a message rather than tell a story, the quality of your story will suffer, and it doesn’t matter what your message is.
Why?
Because you’re taking part of your focus off of things like making sure your dialogue isn’t cringey, your character’s motivations make sense, and that event B proceeds naturally from Event A in order to make sure that the audience gets the Very Important Message that (fill-in-the-blank).
Now, a work where the writer sets out to send a message rather than tell a story can still be good, even great, but it’s not going to be as good as it could have been.
Two other problems with game writing are:
1. The rule of cool – without understanding, what cool ist. Ubi majors in this department. WatchDogs 2 or Riders Republic are my evidences here. But Riders Republic just copies what millions think is cool in Fortnite. Maybe it is really just getting old.
2. There are multiple writers in a game developing team. They can disagree on tropes and moot and have personal favorites. Plus personal can change throughout a years long development cycle. Think of Bloodlines 2. Now, after the original writers team disolved I hear no one being optimistic about the outcome.
This topic (stories, not specifically game stories) is very near and dear to my heart. I wanted to say a whole bunch of things, but it’s honestly too much, and filled with rambling tangents. I will say that I agree with your points overall, especially in regards to storytellers mimicking the big payoff scenes of other stories without actually understanding why they work. When TV shows I have liked have “gone bad” it is often because of this; the later writers attempt to re-create the big powerful moments of earlier writers, without enough understanding of the narrative, the characters, or even why those types of scenes actually work at all. It’s kind of like sitting in an airplane and seeing mountain peaks rising above the clouds, and then thinking that’s all a mountain is: just a disconnected peak of rock hovering in the air, not understanding the massive thing supporting it.
In movies on the other hand, my biggest issue is often the pacing. Good pacing in a movie is even harder to do than in a show, because you have so much less time to work with to tell your story. But the movies and shows I have enjoyed the most have pretty much universally had the best pacing, to the point that pacing has become one of my bigger personal metrics for how well-executed a story is overall.
Ah, ah! He said it! (insert Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at screen meme)
It’s been said above already, but I just want to add that from my past experience it’s absolutely true. The story is written and looks mostly great on paper, but the game isn’t even a little bit playable yet. Then, as the game comes into shape, the writing can be tweaked to make it feel more connected to the game world, but by this point time is tight and maybe there’s only time to make some of the desired writing changes. Then time runs out, the story is locked down perhaps a year in advance so it can be localized in time for a global release. Meanwhile, in the year that follows, the team decides to cut this level, move that level from later to earlier, tweak that system which directly impacts story elements, change this system entirely, etc. Writing is left to ponder how best to fix the mess while keeping in mind how very little can actually change. It’s like looking at VO recorded dialogue and wondering how it can be remixed to express a very difference conversation.
I’m honestly not certain I could appropriately even conceive of all the potential reasons games writing (in the Western AAA market) is so consistently a problem. I think it’s multi-faceted. One example I was going to bring up was listed above, with Boy’s mood swings in the God of War game being an example. Once he discovers his heritage, his attitude completely shifts. There’s no gradual shift of tone or descent into it. He just suddenly acts like a little jerk. It always stunk of something that was forced due to cut content.
I find it interesting that such things feel so much more obvious to me in Western games than they do in my favorite story-driven Japanese games. The Yakuza games and spin-offs in particular rely heavily on establishing mysteries, character relationships, and major set pieces, yet if you were to ask me for sign of the story suffering due to cut content, I’d be at a loss to point anywhere. Of course, it’s equally possible this is due to these games relying on the same engine and underlying tech with each major upgrade. So if I recall, Yakuza 0, 6, Kiwami, Kiwami 2, Judgment, and Lost Judgment are all built on the same engine. Like a Dragon is the same tech as well, but it has a completely different combat system. There’s also the matter of shared assets. Perhaps the willingness of the game’s audience to tolerate what would normally be perceived as lazy for other developers in favor of side quests and strong narrative are what allow the teams to execute as well as they do.
Of course, it could also be a work culture thing, though I don’t know enough about how Japanese game developers feel in regards to things like crunch in a society where long work hours are already the norm. Listening to the Resident Evil 2 post-release videos, however, there’s a general feeling that there was a passion in the project from start to finish. Were the projects also managed better? After all, one of the statements given regarding Last of Us Part 2’s development was regarding people working on assets and snippets that they were never informed were cut days, if not weeks, ago. This sort of poor management could lead to a disaster for the writing team.
Perhaps it also comes down to scale, though. Not every line of dialogue in the Yakuza franchise and spin-off titles is voiced, and there are a lot of canned animations. Yet it never feels as dead as a Bethesda or BioWare game. Here’s a sample side quest that manages to create an intriguing mystery on a budget, but still manages to have more camera angles and audio cues than you might get in similar RPG’s littered with side quests. It’s like there are a variety of stock camera animations and functions to help generate a narrative template. As a result, sure it looks “cheap” and lacks voice acting, but it actually looks better than most dialogues and side quests in BioWare or Bethesda games.
But this isn’t to say I think Japan’s writing is always better or something. I just completed Daemon X Machina, and boy was the writing in that game atrocious. Simultaneously, many of the Japanese games whose stories I enjoy are on a lower budget. So, ironically, it makes me wonder if a smaller budget title actually allows for more focus, and then allows for an easier time managing where your mechanics and narrative will go.
Then again, there’s also a game like Persona 5 Royal. I greatly enjoyed the game and it certainly had a heavy emphasis on narrative, but the original Persona 5 had taken years to make. Perhaps the reality of a game with a good story is that you’re looking at around five years of development to pull it off if you’re aiming for AAA quality standards.
Then you have something like Resident Evil 6, where they definitely had plenty of story, but the writing was just bad anyway.
I’m also curious if it is broader. I don’t know if it’s a film school thing, as suggested above, though that might contribute. When you trace a lot of folks across industries, it seems more like it’s a “who you know” thing than anything else. Games journalists were hired for being active users on that publication’s forum, for example, or amateur fan-fiction or comics writers being hired for big comic book companies (Chris Hastings of Dr. McNinja writing Deadpool was a stroke of genius, but Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics writing Squirrel Girl seems like a total mismatch to me). It feels very much like it’s less about your talent and portfolio and more about your networking capabilities, and while that’s always been true, it feels like the Internet has intensified that in certain areas.
Add to that what someone mentioned above about Whedonisms, where so many would-be writers are striving to write characters that are always giving snappy one-liners and witty comebacks, and you start wondering if we’re just in a period of shallow inspiration. It’s kind of like music, where bands once founded genres coincidentally by combining similar inspirational sources into a new sound, to now so many bands just writing songs to sound like songs they liked growing up. Or, perhaps it’s just what happens when you have so much media that has been worked on for so long that it’s more difficult to cover new ground.
And any of these theories could easily have so many holes in them. In the end, though, I actually think there’s a lot of good writing in games out there. It’s just hard to find it in certain spaces.
And Outriders? Outriders isn’t one of them. That game feels like it’s written to be self-aware comedy, but it’s played so incredibly straight. So straight that it makes me wonder if it really is supposed to be comedy, but… it just… doesn’t seem right.
As for Square Enix, I think they’re at their best in the AA and below space now. With the exception of the upcoming FFXVI, I don’t have much faith in their coming projects. Forspoken is Japanese developed, but they hired Western writers like Gary Whitta and Amy Hennig to contribute. While both are proven writers, the last trailer looked like all the modern tropes of “trendy to Twitter Fandoms” that I’ve grown to dislike. Final Fantasy XV was a mess, and I feel like Final Fantasy VII Remake made a mess of the original and is totally tone deaf. That Stranger of Paradise has become a meme is not surprising, but I feel like no one realizes that Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima are probably 100% convinced this is unironically cool.
So… I dunno. Maybe the problem is AAA, since a lot of the good story stuff seems to be happening on the smaller budget scales, regardless of genre.
Final Fantasy XV is honestly a perfect example of how a game having to reconfigure its story over and over can result in something disjointed and broken. The seams are visible to anyone with eyes.
The analogy I like to use is if the latter half of The Empire Strikes Back was from the point of view of Princess Leia, and Luke just fell onto the scene near the end to tell the audience in dialogue about how Vader cut off his hand and claimed to be his father, with the actual events only depicted if you bought the Episode Luke DLC. Stuff like this happens in that game multiple times. Even its fans are often left resorting to things like “it makes more sense if you watched the anime tie-in prequel”
Honestly, Final Fantasy XV is a perfect example of a big project managed poorly, and is why I have a feeling Tetsuya Nomura is limited to co-director or ideas guy (as little as that appeals to me). We’re talking a game ten years in development, six or seven of which he couldn’t make up his mind. I continually reference his “decision” to change FFXV into a musical after having seen Les Miserables in theaters to summarize the man (that, and needing to hire a fashion designer to teach him how to draw plausible looking clothing). He kept changing his mind on what he wanted the game to be, and so Square replaced him Hajime Tabata for the last 3-4 years of development.
Basically, what we got was a panicked effort to take a giant, epic concept and duct tape it together into a shippable product. To that end, it is surprisingly well put together and Tabata should be applauded. Unfortunately, it goes to show that no amount of time delaying a game will save it if the project is poorly managed. Most of the information left out was done so because of time constraints. I feel like all the tie-in stuff was Square Enix trying to salvage the game by building hype through multimedia.
Final Fantasy XVI should be in better hands, at least, but given their recent exclusivity deals, I’m concerned it’ll be confined to Epic Games Store limbo even if it does get a simultaneous PC release.
I can’t really speak to Dinosaur Comics, but Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl comics are excellent and you should definitely read them unless you hate fun, friendship, cleverness, good intentions, or optimism.
Eh, I’ve sampled some of it, came away unimpressed. I much preferred Gwen Pool for a bit, but I never got past the part where every issue was a commercial for another comic.
Honestly, though, maybe I’m a bad judge of comic writing because I tried several times to get into them and have finally abandoned it. Save for individual collections like Batman: The Long Halloween, I’m basically just not interested in Marvel or DC comics.
Watching the trailers, it seems the story so far is “cram as much YA tropes as possible in it” :D
That’s probably what it is, then, honestly. I don’t really read YA nor watch the films so didn’t know an easy way to summarize it up.
The irony of Young Adult: being enjoyed by more full grown adults than teenagers and College kids.
Well, there are more of us than them.
Teenager status doesn’t last as long as love of stories.
I actually agree. It’s just that culture problems and decision-making problems are different beasts, and the latter is a lot harder to solve.
1) We’re making bad decisions!
2) We don’t know how to diagnose and reform our malfunctioning culture.
I think Zenimax head honcho Altman is a huge jerk, but I do kind of find his failings to be more understandable than those of (say) Andrew Wilson. To fix EA, Wilson just needs to stop making obvious unforced errors. To fix Bethesda, Altman would need to figure how to reform Bethesda’s ongoing dysfunction. You can fix EA by just making changes to the top, but fixing Bethesda is more of a vertical overhaul. I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Robert Altman died in February of this year, just so you know.
Oh wow. I totally missed that.
I wonder who’s running the show now. Wikipedia doesn’t say.
Probably Xerxes III
One important thing about Zenimax is that until its acquisition by Microsoft, it was not a publicly traded company. Altman made Zenimax to be a publisher where developers could make games as long as people liked them and weren’t a money pit. As a result, they don’t have standard AAA values, which is how we get such janky experimental games that are technically amazing in a lot of ways and ridiculously jank in others.
.. I don’t even know if their studios even have dedicated writers.
Love this, Shamus, though I think you missed a part of the forest here.
Part of it is also just programmer brain. For many obvious reasons we work to have everything separated. Better to have a thousand single-use routines doing a thousand different things than to have one mega program that does a thousand things. (it’s a billion times easier to debug in this method for one)
Now the thing of it is – good writing goes against this. Sure you’ll use Single-Use-Scenes(tm) when you’re getting your rough draft done, but that’s because you need to at least get your draft done so it’s just easier a lot of time to write it like a program: Characters go [place]. Characters talk [topic]. Now proceed to action scene. Characters move to new [place].
HOWEVER it is when the writer goes back and does the edit on the story, that’s when the true skill shine because then you should be looking for single use scenes to eliminate and instead start overlapping them. In a story, you absolutely want one scene accomplishing a thousand things.
So yeah, a tricky problem that’s not going to go away any time soon. Because of their structure and nature, games would probably benefit by going with a more minimalist route (like Ico or Shadows of Colossus) than much in detail.
For anybody who hasn’t played it yet, I strongly recommend The Writer Will Do Something.
It’s a short semi-interactive text adventure from the point of view of a writer in a meeting with the heads of a major game studio, and it paints an amazing picture of the kinds of dysfunctions you’ll find in the industry.
Seriously, it’s 20 minutes tops. Go play it.
And it underscores why game stories suck – the story is one of like *5* competing priorities in a AAA game, and in terms of money made it’s probably the least important. It’s not that it’s impossible to tell a good story, it’s that it’s nearly impossible to tell a good story *and* have good gameplay *and* good graphics *and* logical progression etc etc.
The reason “setting as story” works so well is that there’s no narrative to upend. If we have to cut an entire level, there’s no vital plot point or cutscene that’s getting awkwardly moved to another zone or skipped altogether.
Let me very gently push back on one tiny aspect here, with full acknowledgement it is a small issue.
A bad programmer will make lots of mistakes. I know many bad programmers who manage to get by becaysr they can fake the basics and are mostly modifying code. But a bad carpenter is a danger to himself and others. They can cause real and immediate physical harm, or leave long-tetm dangers in their work. Ironically, I think Shamus may have (unintentionally!) slipped into the same fault he was describing.
Of course, its not always this way. A bad carpenter might be doing sloppy jobs as a handyman instead of major construction. But most bad programmers are working on unimportant web apps or whatever instead of mission-critical medical technology as well.
I think his point was just that the bad carpenter can walk away from the boards nailed together and it looks like a structure, especially if you don’t know anything about carpentry. Sure, it collapses when you stand on it, but you don’t know it’s bad until you try it, or at least look at it in a detailed way.
If the programmer’s code won’t compile even someone with no knowledge of what a game is supposed to be can look at a compiler’s error output and say “Yeah looks like this didn’t work”. He won’t know why, but he’ll know it’s not supposed to look like that. It’s supposed to have some kind of gorilla throwing barrels.
Though even bad programmers can easily hides away their faults: compilations error can be removed by enough tweaking of the code (like commenting the offending line(s), then wondering one hour later why the score doesn’t update), changes can be made without understanding, usually by copy-pasting (which usually creates ineficiencies or bugs); they can also ask for help (either outside people (i.e. SO) or their colleagues). It also depends if it’s a bad programmer because they can’t write correct code or don’t know the domain knowledge required to write a useful program (and each case creates its own issues).
I think the point I wanted to make is that there’s code written by gainfully employed bad programmers that’s deployed.
I work in IT, and half of my “programmer” colleagues (i’m not a programmer myself, to be clear), couldn’t code their way out of “Hello, World” without looking it up on StackOverflow.
The amount of programming done by people can’t actually code is immense; also, in a lot of programs the actual programming is hidden away more and more under several layers of GUIs and systems. If you’re using the right tools, you can design entire new programs and systems without typing one line of code. Just like I know web programmers and website designers who wouldn’t know how to create an HTML file.
It’s probably obvious, but my passage on coding is greatly informed by my younger days in the old-school world of C / C++. I can’t imagine how anyone could hope to fake their way through that maze in early days of the internet.
But yeah. I guess the coding world looks different now. The idea of a non-coder “writing code” is strange and alien to me, but I guess it’s becoming more common.
The idea that a modern web developer might not know how to write HTML is a real eye-opener for me. Before this blog, I coded my entire website by hand in a text editor. (Uphill, both ways.)
And I had to support Internet Explorer! And had none of those new flanged thingy like firebug to help development!
But yeah, tools have progressed a lot: (as a programmer), I think I could do a “hello world” easily in my usual language (java) if I’m using an IDE which deals with imports, compilation, some of the boilerplate code and running the code (to say nothing of things like debugging); but with just a cmd and a text editor, that’d be more complicated.
I know that I shouldn’t make this joke, but regardless: that’s what Python’s for.
It’s a joke, there is decent python code, look at youtube-dl for example.
Did you know python can emulate 99% of C/C++ programs in just one line?
print(“Segmentation Fault”)
This is why Python is superior to C/C++, you don’t have to bother with all this (failing!) compilation before you get to the segfault stage ;-).
This article reminds me a lot of a Matt Colville video I watched awhile back. I can’t recall if it was a game he was the writer for or a story from a writer friend of his that he was telling but essentially it came down to the higher ups from the Publisher saying “we don’t like the story, rewrite it”. Cue the writer asking for more information, “What don’t you like? What needs to be changed? etc.” and no response. Finally a friend lets the writer know that there is nothing wrong. The higher ups never even read the story. It’s all just power politics and the writing is the easiest thing to redo without costing untold amounts of additional labour or time. Power dynamics between the studio and the publisher and the game suffers for it, and more often than not the story gets hit first. I can imagine that should this happen consistently, writers stop caring too much about their story, especially the first draft if they’ll be forced to rewrite a new one on a whim.
Not sure if it’s exactly the same but isn’t the internet full of this?
“That’s so easy!”
“I could do better”
Many gaming videos have comments like this. You just don’t get to see the fall because, chances are, a commenter won’t show their attempts, failures or updates that the skill shown wasn’t as simple as they expected.
There’s also every person who decides that a planner is a waste of money for a major party and decides that they’ll do all the setup/invites/scheduling/booking etc.. themselves and suffer a mental breakdown as a result…
Okay so I have more to say that I will actually put together into a coherent thought string at some point, but for right now I can’t do anything but think about a CEO named Oldie McGolfputt, and laugh my ass off.
1.) Team size and organizational structure. When hundreds of people are mashing a vague shape into a coherent gaming experience, the only way to keep a story elegant is for the writers to be aware of changes and able to either veto or adapt the story. That’s asking a LOT of the budget, writing talent, and team cooperation. Hopefully you’ve got hundreds of people whose grade school teachers graded them well on “works well with others”. Team size is a barrier to coherent storytelling. Smaller team sizes would help a lot; small enough that a designer who has an idea can work with a writer to make sure that changes fit.
2.) Voice acting. It seems to me that voiced protagonists damage the ability to tell a good story since they’re more locked in. Voiced townspeople or NPCs seem easier to dance around. Voice acting in general, though, is an impediment to good storytelling when in this nebulous area of creation and large scale games.
3.) Writers’ poor education, a life spent thinking in tropes, and political bullying. This is their brain pattern. They were raised by Hollywood and video games. Their schools punished individual expression and rewarded rote memorization. Many haven’t read recreationally since before the idea of reading began to feel like a chore with a weekly test on chapters 11 and 12. And so they lack imagination and fear risks.
Give me Jennifer Hepler to write troubling stuff like A Paragon of Her Kind in Dragon Age: Origins. Shock and appall me with ideas I’ve never thought about before. Make me hate a believable villain. Make me question myself after I enthusiastically punch an annoying reporter. I used to appreciate Bioware’s writers for offering interesting places outside of real life boundaries. Even as late as SWTOR they were putting wild stuff into the stories. If willingness to take risks with controversial subjects is diminished by fear of social pushback then risks will generally be avoided. The lack of risks reminds me of a theory for why Punk music is mostly gone: to be counter culture in 2021 gets you cancelled.
What is ‘canceling’, anyway? Is it kind of like what we used to call black-listing?
Yeah. New terminology for the same proclivity. Perhaps the brand has been refreshed to be palatable to a fresh audience. Black-listing sounds 1950s and a bit stuffy.
It’s similar, but less top-down. It’s the mob ‘justice’ version of blacklisting.
Blacklisting was Oldie McGolfPutt himself saying “Nobody ever hire that writer Younguy Smartmouth because he said I’m bad a golf, and I’ll ruin anyone who does!”
Cancelling is a group of people on twitter starting a campaign to have everyone they can call Oldie McGolfPutt and tell him to fire Younguy Smartmouth or else they’ll mob outside his house and try to make his life miserable.
Regarding continuing story arcs vs anthologies and Final Fantasy in particular; (From the Diecast but more apt for this thread);
Final Fantasy 2 was a great game that helped define my childhood. It took me a bit to get into it as it was different from the original. FF2 was pretty much the first the first RPG that didn’t have you design your own characters and had it’s own characters and story. I was so excited to see more of the world and characters. The Final Fantasy’s that came after didn’t do that. Instead it became part of the disappointments that helped define my childhood once I realized I was never going to see more of those characters or a continuation of that story. Soured me forever. I have never liked any of the Final Fantasy series since.
Therefore I cannot agree with your take on anthologies being superior to continuations. I think both can work or fail. But certainly I don’t think they are better. If the reason why you like a story/game is because you like the characters and their dynamic, then getting rid of those characters gets rid of the very reason you like the story/game. Plus you aren’t fixing the core problem. One set of problems is simply being traded for another.
If game works because of Morodin, Garrus, Wrex and Legion, you can’t just reboot it into a new anthology. Changing the names and copy/paste their personalities into a new narrative is easily seen though and falls flat. It’s a bad idea unless the lesser off-brand version is the goal.
Plenty of books manage to be a self contained story that continues past its end into a book series. Where each separate book stands on its own merits, and stands together as a larger whole without devolving into drivel. However the good tend not to bring back dead villains or hit the exact same character and story beats exactly the same way. There is absolutely no reason why games have to be bad this way. It’s simply bad writing and bad choices. Lord of the Rings is a continuation of The Hobbit. Tolkien did not know how those stories were going to lead into each other nor how they were going to end. Especially when he started. You don’t need to plan out an entire 15yr trilogy to have a good story continue. This goes for games too.
Like Mass Effect. The mistake wasn’t that it was impossible to continue the story. The mistake was that all the story threads allowing it continue past the first game were deliberately cut and burned. If they hadn’t done that it could have continued logically. This is true with or without a roadmap planning it out for all the games. Having a vague idea of what the ending will look like in 9 or 12 books etc is not more or less work than having a vague idea of how a long running game series should end. But if you deliberately destroy all the connecting tissue in book 5 then of course it won’t work as a whole.
Likewise Assassin’s Creed *is* already an anthology at its core. The problem there is the cruft that forces itself in to tie the story together from game to game. It would be pretty easy to cut out all the future-looking-back-on-the-past bullshit. That’s the soap. It is also easy to not use the same organizations again and again. Because history never ends. Humans and societies tend to do the same things and make the same mistakes time and time again throughout history. The sins of previous generations coming back to cause current problems is enough of a tie-in to keep the opera.
The trick is being a good writer. That’s it. The reason games have such an issue with this isn’t development time (which is similar to movies and many books) it is because they often change writers between projects. Problem is they aren’t fungible. They mistake the trappings as the story.
Thank you for an excellent response to my question, Shamus! I am curious if you think this problem has become more pervasive in recent years.
I think the last straw for me with Outriders, was when I was given a side quests that involved nothing but a cutscene, in which my character witnesses a previously unknown NPC re-enact the Russian Roulette scene from the movie “Deer Hunter”.
The scene and the character had no significant connection to my character or the rest of the story. It was utterly pointless and offensive. It was obvious that someone at the studio had watched the movie and decided that it would be super cool to waste time, money, and resources creating this completely disposable sidequest.
Amazingly enough, they made the damn thing repeatable!
I don’t think that writing itself is getting worse pre se, but I do think that more games are aiming for being “cinematic”. We’re seeing more cutscenes and story is becoming a bigger part of the experience, and so the already-bad writing is being shoved to the forefront.
That’s my guess, anyway.
Uhhhhh… repeatable Russian Roulette. It does not work that way!
“If you lose, I want you to kill the President.”
I know Soulslikes tend to be a slightly inflamed topic around here, but I think The Surge is a pretty interesting case study in the rare great story, told poorly.
Because the ingredients are all there for freakin’ GREAT sci-fi. Does the ends justify the means, even if those despicable means is saving the world and/or humanity? Can even a mega-corp have good intentions and wish to save people, but genuine screw the frick up, or was it all just an act to keep the workers in line? How innocent is a ‘child,’ and how much is their life worth, if that child’s also a science abomination that will kill thousands just by their grand potential meaning their BIRTH will spill that much blood?
But, well, outside of a couple great scenes like the opening I won’t spoil just in case somebody gets curious, far too much of that above is—due to the influences of Dark Souls no doubt—just hinted at instead of actually explored by actual text. All that compeling stuff? Almost all sub-text, and you have to REALLY LOVE The Surge to even consider thinking about it.
It’s a dang shame. Would love some sort of ‘Director’s Cut’ versino of that game that cleaned up that story to tell it even slightly better, but… well, that’s a dang rare thing in games outside of Hideo Kojima and his cinephile obsession.
I was listening to Castle Super Beast a couple weeks ago, and they talked about this very problem. Video games are the only medium where you really can just throw money at the problem and make it objectively better (via hiring more people to work on ironing out gameplay and removing bugs), but you can’t just pay more for a better story.
Another observation I might add to the pile (apologies if it’s been mentioned before, it’s a long thread at this point):
I think a lot of writers are becoming aware of the issue of the story being doled out in distinct units, the very awkward “Gameplay-Cutscene” loop. This can lead to the story coming out not just disjointed, but also rather disconnected from the core experience of the player. I’ve seen a number of games attempt to work through this by including narrative bits during the gameplay sections: Characters have conversations, NPCs can be overheard, audio logs/journal entries, etc.
And I applaud the effort! But I’ve seen it go very poorly. The characters are having important conversations in the middle of combat, so the dialog has to compete with combat sounds and player focus on not dying. NPC conversations that can be overheard can also be missed entirely, for one reason or another. Maybe it’s a co-op game, so you’re missing a lot of this because you’re talking to your friend(s) and not listening to the characters, or the other player(s) don’t want to wait 5 minutes while you read journal entries on the way to your goals.
I guess the point coming from this is that sometimes the writing itself might be fine, but the gameplay is getting in the way of actual delivery of the narrative elements, which can create a poor impression of the writing overall. I don’t think this is “ludonarrative dissonance” the way people usually discuss it, but it is a case where the two elements of the game are not harmonizing.
“Writing is bolted onto a game as if it was a cosmetic element instead of making it part of the foundation.”
I think that this is definitely one of the larger issues. One of the places you can see this kind of thing particularly strongly is in RPG’s like, say, Divinity Original Sin II. It’s VERY CLEAR from the way the game plays that different writers were handed different areas/quests. So the overall tone is just all over the place, from eldritch horror to some really stupid attempts at humor.
For many games, one of the major problems with writing is just that the game is TOO BIG for one person to keep control over the storytelling, especially as every bit of the game goes through multiple iterations, things are cut, the order of events gets re-juggled, deadlines for voice acting have to be met, etc.
You need a hyper-organized whip-cracking hardass who knows storytelling inside and out to run the writing team and keep on top of every tiny detail and be willing to go to war with other teams when they know that their “area” is generally considered of lesser importance. And most writers, no matter how professional, aren’t that kind of person. Heck, from recent scandals we know that most of the people who make video games aren’t that kind of person. Some of them can barely get organized enough to actually put out a game. When people hire writers they tend to prize “creative” over “competent”. But a game doesn’t need an incredibly CREATIVE story from inane dreamers frothing about how “badass” something is going to be until it’s cut into a jumbled mess due to time constraints. It needs a COMPETENT one, made by someone who can make a plan and also alter that plan as needed while keeping the core intact.
It’s actually one thing I respect New World for (and I’ve seen articles complaining about it). They have EXTREMELY minimalist writing and quest structure that always boils down to roughly the same thing: go here, do a thing, come back, get reward. There are MANY hundreds of quests; I think as of last count I’ve done like 283 of the things, and that’s not counting the many community board and faction missions I’ve done. But the quest design is FUNCTIONAL. If they’d tried to add greater complexity it would have become incredibly annoying and tedious without improving the game in any way.
Personally, I think they could have done away with the NPC questgivers almost entirely except for the main story missions. Then they could have invested more in actually giving the main story NPC’s some real personality. I think the faction NPC’s needed a bit more personality as well, but the personality bits did not necessarily need to be tied to quests. When someone is picking up or turning in a quest, they’re generally in a hurry and not interested in listening to a bunch of chat, particularly if they’re turning in multiple quests at once, which tend to blur together. They could have done like Diablo III did and given key NPC’s a series of “so, tell me more about you and your place in the world” dialogs that are optional, but maybe you get a small reward like XP or cheevos for pursuing them.
They could also have done “hidden” dialogs where you have to find something out in the world and bring it to that NPC in order to trigger that dialog. Basically, turn the story into its own gameplay mode separate from the quest grinding system.
And I think they should have voiced the documents you find all over the world that give you XP instead, so instead of having to STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF A DANGEROUS AREA TO READ A DOCUMENT THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE SCREEN IN A GAME THAT YOU CANNOT PAUSE THAT HAS CONSTANTLY RESPAWNING FOES, when you click on the document you can just LISTEN to it as you continue to run around and whack things.
They could even have gone one better and given you longer stories that you could listen to while you’re doing the more mindless tasks, like chopping down entire forests to level your logging skill.
Since the game is nominally set in the “real” world, they could have done this in a really peculiar way by digging up era-appropriate real life works that fit the theme of the game, and letting you listen to exerpts from those.
Is this counter-intuitive? Yes. NPC’s that DON’T talk and documents that DO?! What the heck? But I think it would have served the game function a lot better.
Another game that did this well was the original Gothic. The writing in that game was unimpressive in the extreme, but it was FUNCTIONAL. And it was integrated with the way the game PLAYED so well that it came across as GOOD WRITING even though if you analyzed it on its own it was high-school-writing-project quality at BEST. It did what it needed to do and didn’t fall all over itself straining after drama it couldn’t pull off.
So you wind up with this sort of list for a lead writer:
1. Hyper-organized
2. Hardass who nevertheless can cooperate with all the other departments.
3. Knows storytelling inside and out
4. Detail-oriented to the point of insanity
5. Prioritizes function over creativity while nevertheless trying to work in as much creativity as is worthwhile.
6. Good manager, who can run a department and keep a bunch of creatives working
7. Understands game development pipeline
8. Flexible enough to respond usefully to sudden issues and need for cuts/reworking of their vision.
The number of people working in the games industry with all of those qualities is probably in the single digits.
Another reason why the Dunning-Kruger effect might be more common in writing than in other fields is that there is a lower barrier of entry. If someone who’s never drawn tries to make concept art they’ll struggle to make stick figures. If someone who’s never coded tries to write code for the physics engine they won’t be able to get it to compile. If someone who’s never played an instrument tries to compose the OST they won’t be able to play the instruments at all. But if someone who’s never written a story before opens Word and starts typing in sentences they’ll probably have something readable after they’re done. The sentences might even be grammatically and syntactically correct! Writing is easy!
Why, I’m writing right now in reply! I don’t get what all the fuss is about. Anyone could do this!
I’ll have you know that I’ve been writing since I was a child!
If you want vibrant characters in your writing, I know a neat trick. Use comic sans ms!
…well, for some unknown reason, now I’m in the mood to talk about literature, especially Goethe.
I bought a Goethe/Faust collection from the Library discard for a dollar. Turns out Goethe is a good writer. He’s got that Shakespeare iambic pentameter going, so even if you hit a slow patch in the story, you can let the rhythm carry you and just groove through it. His version of Faust is actually kind of a romp; he essentially catches the demon Mephistopheles in a foottrap and makes him promise him knowledge and power. Mephistopheles transports him all over the world to see cool stuff, and Faust is like “This is incredible” and Mephistopheles is like “I know, this is totally worth your soul!” Then he meets a Christian girl who’s immune to the devil’s powers, and sets out to ruin her faith so she’ll join him in devilry. The story kind of skips some steps there, and I don’t remember the ending, but it was a fun story. Somewhat dark at the end but pretty fun.
Egmont stood out for some reason, and I’m not sure why. I think it’s because it’s basically a political fantasy, except it’s not fantasy at all. There’s been a riot, the king of Spain wants vengeance, but the local lords mostly agree the best thing is to forget about it, which leads the king to send a killer to take vengeance on the nobles themselves. There’s a heavy tension in the setting, as Egmont tries to maintain loyalty to both the king and the people. Probably helps I had no idea what the historical events were, or how many of these characters were even real.
Don’t remember the third one’s title, but it was about a young nobleman falling in love with a refugee, but chickening out on telling her and letting her think he was asking her to be a house maid. It’s in… heptameter? Fourteen or fifteen beats per line. It’s a very lighthearted story, with very distinct sections; trying to convince his father to allow the marriage, trying to convince the refugee to come live with him, and trying to deal with the awkwardness of everyone knowing she’s his bride except for her. Didn’t stick with me like Egmont but it was still a joy.
…
…So. Melville. I’ve tried reading Moby Dick once or twice, and just… gave up. The first two chapters of the book introduce two characters; Chapter 1 introduces Ishamel, of course, and Chapter 2 introduces… a crew member who’s name I’ve forgotten. The crew member gives the impression of being kind of unstable, but… nobody does anything in the first two chapters. The two characters talk, but don’t argue, don’t form a comradery, just… talk. There’s nothing to grab hold of. as far as I know this is a prevasive problem with the book; I think someone a long while back linked a full page of Moby Dick just about what the whiteness of the white whale doesn’t look like.
I’m taking Ray Bradbury’s word that Melville wasn’t very successful in his lifetime, which is always sad to hear. But… the thing about posthumously successful people, is that their work is almost always a mixed bag. The idea of Moby Dick has obvious staying power; countless other stories have the dangerous obsession motif. Jaws is basically a really small-scale version of Moby Dick and was enormously successful. Hell, Raiders of the Lost Ark has some Moby Dick in there. The idea has staying power, but the writing… oof, the writing. I don’t get the appeal of Vincent Van Gogh and I don’t get the appeal of Andy Kaufman and I don’t get the appeal of Herman Melville.
…
Ever onward. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was a good read, though hard to follow on account of most of the characters having multiple names. There’s also a distinct serial feel; certain scenes feel like filler, presumably because they were. I’d heard Nietsche took the horse-whipping scene particularly hard, so I was surprised to find the entire thing was a dream sequence (albeit poignant; a coachman promises his old nag of a horse can still gallop, and proceeds to whip it to death trying to make it do the impossible). But the desperation of the setting shines through the whole time, whether Raskolnikov will get away with the murder and what he will do if he does. Plus Detective Patrovich is mesmerizing, and directly responsible for Columbo, which is good enough on its own.
One particular line stuck with me (paraphrased because I don’t remember the wording, and it was translated anyway): “How had he not seen that the fact he had to ask what Napoleon would have done, meant he was not a Napoleon.”
…
Lastly, I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis a long time ago. It was okay, but I didn’t get much out of it. One scene did stick with me, however; the giant insect’s sister sees he likes crawling on the walls, so she starts removing the old human furniture from his room that he can’t use anymore. He can’t say anything, but internally he’s screaming not to remove those because it’s all that’s keeping his memory of humanity alive. That… basically is the whole reason I still try to socialize with people; the idea that if I stop I’ll lose the ability entirely.
So I didn’t get much out of Metamorphosis when I read it. But, having seen a relative develop dementia and have to live with their children as a significantly different person, I feel like I would get more out of it if I read it again now. It strikes me that it’s probably a pretty apt metaphor for developing a crippling disease like that, that doesn’t let you contribute and makes the people around you uncomfortable.
…
So. All of that to say, don’t let Moby Dick put you off old literature. Most of them are much better reads.
I just finished playing the Marvel Avenger’s game campaign, and then read your article. It kind of nails the premise of the article – that the way the story plays out is not very good.
The story and writing probably occurred in reaction to the game type that was being developed.
I’m guessing that the process that occurred was:
1. Executives: What is the most profitable game type? Live service games. Let’s make our Avengers game into one of those (and we won’t have to abort our attempt like we did with Deus Ex). Developer, make it happen.
2. Developers: How do we overcome the ‘Superman problem’ (where the heroes are so powerful, it is hard to find long lasting, credible opponents)? Who can the Avengers beat up on indefinitely, and pose a credible threat? Supervillains could be fine as one-off bosses, but we need regular goons and minibosses to beat up. Robots would probably be good, as well as random armored goons. We can’t just do Ultron drones, cause we already had that Avengers movie. Hydra? No, again was in the movies, and the goons are mostly just humans that are easily beat up. AIM? Jackpot! Writers, get to work.
3. Writers: How do we get AIM in a place to where they are a huge threat for the Avengers, and not just a one mission thing? Let’s have them pretty much already have taken over the world. How can that happen if the Avengers are around? Well, let’s just say the the Avengers were not around, but in this current “Game as a Service” world they have gotten back together and are fighting back. We can create a campaign to show ‘getting the band back together’. But as part of the ‘dependancy chain’, we have to create a reason for them to disassemble, and create a compelling reason why it is hard for them to reassemble.
The end result is a story that has an enjoyable Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with Kamala, but otherwise merely hits the plot points needed to address the reasons above. There is no satisfying character/villain development, plot contrivances occur just so they can hit plot points, etc.
All this work just to arrive at a premise and possible setup storyline, but since the inciting idea is ‘make an Avengers service game’ rather than ‘make a good Avengers game’, the whole thing already seems to be built on faulty foundations.