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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2066 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 3, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Game writers can’t write. That’s because studios hire DnD nerds who have no interest or knowledge of actual literature, have either never read the greats or dismiss them out of hand, and basically don’t understand what makes storytelling good or powerful in any way.

But isn't this the opposite of what happened? Writing started going downhill the moment they stopped hiring nerds for writing positions and started hiring creative writing and English graduates with "geeky" popular culture interests.

To me it seems like there is an issue of people being hired who don't have interests outside of videogames/anime/etc, which makes the writing and it's influences very incestous. The influences aren't history or literary greats but previous videogames and TV shows, which makes everything extremely shallow and derivative.

I think that’s not clear at all. Firstly, the great majority of “classic” games before professional writers were also terribly, awfully written, even if they were terribly, awfully written in a slightly different way to games today. Secondly many of the great games were written by people who were nerds, sure, but had an amateur interest at least in good storytelling and / or screenwriting.

One of the problems in games (especially at Bioware and Sony Santa Monica) is that they had a big pipeline of writers promoted from QA, or games journalism, or level design, or other teams in the business to game writing, and were only then revealed to be bad writers. They don’t have a screenwriting background where you cover basic stuff that’s relevant to writing halfway decent dialogue.

I feel like a big part of the problem with modern games is that they just try too hard to be novels or movies. I miss the old minimalist approach that was more about establishing a tone and the outline of a plot, and letting you fill in the rest with your imagination, than about spelling out every freaking detail.

I realize that this was largely due to technical limitations, but some people just need enforced discipline.

Firstly, the great majority of “classic” games before professional writers were also terribly, awfully written...

I don't agree with your thesis that games have always been poorly written. Obviously individual works vary, but on the whole story driven games like RPGs used to be written pretty well.

For every Planescape Torment there were literally a thousand 90s games with terrible writing, including many RPGs, come on.

How many RPGs were even published in the 90s? Particularly if you're excluding Japanese games where the localization decisions would play a huge role in perception of writing quality.

No, I don't agree that was the case.

Most point and click adventures had decent and enjoyable stories (since they were carried or buried by them), RPGs were hit or miss because they had a tendency to rely on D&D clichés, but unless you're referring to some B-list stuff, this seems flatly wrong.

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