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Notes -
This is based off a comment I made to a group of friends, and it was suggested I post it here; I've edited it to be more approachable but please forgive any poorly explained references.
I am continuously boggled by how bad the drop off in video game writing has been. Inversely, it’s shocking how passable and even good it is coming from (mostly text based) games in the 90s and early 2000s. The people making those stories were often programmers with no creative history, so it’s surprising to me that they were able to put out such quality writing with any level of consistency.
Take the Mac game Marathon. There are definitely duds in the writing, mostly Durandal (a recently gone-insane AI) being wacky, but the majority of the writing is pretty good. Even the “computer being crazy” was a somewhat fresher concept, so I’ll excuse the missteps. More than that, the writers Jason Jones and Greg Kirkpatrick were still in/barely out of college when they made Marathon. That’s just astounding to me given the quality of some of the terminals.
The other example is Ares, another 90s Mac game (guess when and how I grew up). It's a much smaller game, with a less sprawling story, but what is there is pretty good quality. It’s not Marathon level writing, but its development was even smaller scale - basically a one man show. One guy was able to code an entire game, write the music, and write the story, and it’s all passable at absolute worst. Even more than the overall story, the quality of the writing on a basal level is quite good.
My question is how did this happen? Thinking on it has given me three main possibilities:
The first is just that the people making games - and particularly their stories - have changed. As the coding and graphics and scale get more complex, you can’t juggle everything as the project lead and reasonably be able to produce anything above indie level. I definitely think this is the majority of it. But I also think culture has an effect on this, and my second and third theories touch on that.
Second is that I think it’s an indicator of the quality of education, and especially higher education, falling significantly. I have no evidence for this, but the amount of knowledge the creators of old had in their back pockets to make their stories feel genuinely vast and deep, not entirely myopic.
That leads me into my third theory, which is nerd culture at large falling apart completely. This isn’t a new idea, but it used to be that being a nerd required you to be immersed in whatever passion you had, often alone. Greg Kirkpatrick admitted he read a ton of sci-fi and played a ton of DnD, and he drew on both of those for Marathon. As a personal anecdote, my recently deceased grandfather is universally considered to have had Asperger’s. The breadth of how he lived is astounding, though. He built a house, engineered rockets, became computer literate on his own (well past when he'd have been expected to do so), raced bikes, and played music. Absolutely a renaissance man in every way. In all I don’t see nerds and the autistic (they’re correlated) having near as comprehensive an upbringing. Maybe it’s the death of reading, maybe it’s being terminally online. It's all just sadly lacking. I don't think I have to illustrate that the barrier of entry to "being a nerd" is basically just saying you are. On that note, there's a trend of “nerds” that are just English majors who played games, which might explain how a lot of dedicated professional AAA video game writers are so bad.
As a counterpoint, Prey 2017 had its story written by its lead developer, as well as some of the music. I think the fact that it’s so good is a testament to the need for a game to have its own solid vision, even as the scale increases. Maybe that’s the root cause more than anything else.
Some additional considerations (and my responses to them):
I think you're ignoring that video games are big business these days, with large staffs. You're going to have a lot of people just phoning it in, along with a general regression to the mean. It's possible for a single person operation to knock it out of the park (or completely bomb, but you're probably not going to hear about that game). It's really hard for a 1000 person operation do do anything that far above average (average for a professional).
In addition to the size of the staff, you also have the costs of the game exploding; one of the interesting side effects of this is has been that anything put into the game has to become accessible to anyone who has the game (or they've wasted a lot more real money than they would have before).
A long time ago, I remember reading a definition of the 'types' of gamers; although I cannot for the life of me track it down, I can remember that some of them were as follows:
(you'd assume that with this much detail, I'd easily be able to track it down, but alas, no luck).
I am pretty sure that the strategy of making all content in the game accessible to anyone ends up alienating players who enjoy challenge and exploration. I could also see arguments as to how anyone who enjoys immersion and power fantasy would end up feeling dissatisfied too - I just don't personally find those as critical in my enjoyment of games, so can't comment.
Although it may be cherry-picking a little bit, I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of what makes some games into a sudden and surprising success is that they tap into one or more of these markets that are just not being explored by the mainstream.
I think a lot of people rush to defend the plot to these games because the plot literally feels better when it's acting in support of the feeling that you want to get from the game. Unless you are a Subsumption (and possibly Immersion) gamer, you become interested in the plot when your other wants are being met.
Is it a version of Bartle's 4 types of MUD players?
That seems very strongly related, although it isn't the one I read back in the day. Thanks for sharing!
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I think a significant part of it is simply staff size. A 10-man team can create a work of art. A 1000-man team is answering to shareholders first.
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Am I just overly normy and lame for thinking that Skyrim and GTA5 are both absolutely fantastic games? Whenever this topic of video games comes up, I always feel like I'm missing something.
Both of those games are over a decade old. It could be a symptom of the drop-off that he's talking about that you aren't listing newer ones.
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I found Skyrim to be an impressive game in all aspects when it was new, but the charm wore off within a few months and I don't have a very positive perception of it. The music and art design have aged more gracefully than, say, Oblivion, however, and I still appreciate those. GTA V is a flashy game that had even less staying power to me. The graphics are a step up, but the gameplay and story was a huge step down from GTA IV.
Both those games are fine, but they're just fine.
That's pretty much exactly the same feeling I got of Skyrim.
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I think Skyrim is a great game, but not for its writing. Try to just play the main quest, not too much of it is actually good, and it's a very short story.
GTA5 is the only game that ever actively convinced me to stop playing it. If the developers had any balls, they'd put the torture mission inside the Steam refund window.
It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines, none of which can be hastened by a training montage or a time skip. The power-fantasy "Chosen One" trope means that many of those arcs are expected to scale from stranger-off-the-street origins at the beginning to change-the-world consequences at the end. Designing for the player to get to experience all those quests means they need to be individually short enough that the game as a whole can be considered "completed" within 40 or 50 hours. And yet this is a game, so even with fast travel the vast majority of those hours are going to be gameplay.
Put that all together, and the next thing you know your axe-wielding barbarian who learned a few spells is getting made the Arch Mage, and your suspension of disbelief is shattered.
The first doesn't follow from the second. Oblivion had open world play and was somewhat infamous for having better side quests (notably the guild storylines) than the main quest.
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They're perfectly fine games. (Paarthurnax and Trevor are my favorite characters from each, for vastly differing reasons.) They're just open world games and are considered inferior to their predecessors by auteurs. To a certain degree, they're right, but they exaggerate it for memes.
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To be a nerd about this: you mean decreased.
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I've never used a Mac, and this thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard of the Marathon game. It's amazing that such a piece of gaming history has completely passed me by, despite having been a gamer for all of my life.
There is a whole book on it too which is neat:
https://www.bitmapbooks.com/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition
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I want to do a sense-check to see if I agree with your core hypothesis. Here are a list of video games which I consider particularly well-written:
I count three games which came out in the past ten years, ten which came out in the ten years prior to that, and eight which came out in the ten years prior to that. This suggests that stories in games were finding their feet in the PS1 era, achieved a creative peak in the late PS2-PS3 era, and have been declining in quality since the onset of the PS4 era, with most of the interesting creative stuff happening in the indie space. However, this is a biased sample, as all of my gaming is done on PC and prior to a few months ago my laptop wasn't powerful enough to run any game which came out in the past five years.
This is a great list of narratively strong games but I think this misses something unique in how video games deliver narrative. The interactive nature of video games means that the reader/player can experience narrative through gameplay itself. Video games are distinct in this player experiential means of narrative communication.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for example has the player personally experiencing being beaten down by it's punishing combat system, then getting passingly good at that system, getting over their fears within that system, and then experiencing mastery over it. The endboss line "Hesitation is defeat" is not just a good character line, it is an expression of what is being experienced by both the in-game character and also the player. You the player have to get past your desire for safety and instead fight on the knifes edge, and overcome. Your experience mirrors the character's own experience of repeated trial, overcoming of the desire for safety, and success. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
Victoria 2 has no narrative at all. It's a grand strategy game full of mathematical expressions of interest groups, migrations, military power, & prestige. But through repeated games you the player experience the narrative of what it means to be a nation amidst Great Power politics. Of the iron faced incentives structures set by the world around you. Play as france and you may find yourself willing to go to war over this pointless piece of land in Africa no one had ever heard before called Fashoda just as an excuse to start a war to devastate a nation simply to avoid them overcoming you economically and subsequently militarily. So you have to go to war now, before it's too late. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
Frostpunk is a city builder that takes place in a steampunk Victorian Era cold driven apocalypse. There are a few dialogues to set the tone or inform you about what's causing the next crisis. But overwhelmingly the narrative is told through decision making. The first time you play (before repetition causes desensitization) you sit grim faced at each challenge. You may demand people work extreme hours with no rest. Children into coal mines. The butchery of innocent sick and wounded just to make room for the next batch and because it's not worth it to recover them when food is so low. The sincere temptation of dictatorship or religious fanaticism just to keep control of the populace long enough to make it to the next day. 'we can always loosen things up later' you tell yourself. Your jaw has been clenched for three hours without realizing it as you make Sophies Choice tradeoff decisions that you deem necessary because your people are all that's left and The City Must Survive. But there is little dialogue, just experience.
I think video games have a really powerful means of getting a person to emotionally understand a narrative or setting in a way that books and movies simply canot. It's different to read an idea or see it versus being personally constricted by a system and condemned to navigate a world within it's rules. So while I think your list is a fantastic set of games, a golden age even, I think your comment on decline since the ps4 overlooks how games more broadly can communicate narrative outside of the traditional considerations of dialogue or imagery.
I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
In a rather similar vein, I really enjoyed the narrative and dialog in Firewatch (2016), even if, in some ways, it's more of an interactive novel. It's probably not for everyone, but the menu option to play with only a map and compass is an interesting vibe, too.
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I took the OP's question as one of asking "among the subset of games which tell linear narrative stories with plots, characters, dialogue etc., have these stories declined in quality over time?" I think that's a fundamentally different question to the question of whether games without such narratives have improved or declined in quality. In Frostpunk, there is no "narrative": the narrative is the player's experience in the game, enabled by the mechanics. It's the difference between a novel and a DnD campaign. Everyone intuitively understands that Frostpunk is trying to do something fundamentally different from what Call of Duty is trying to do, at a mechanical and experiential level - it's confusing that "success" in game design is invariably described in reference to how "fun" the game is, when this descriptor hides more than it illuminates.
And maybe this is part of the story: maybe at the start of the PS4 era, all the smart game designers in the indie space collectively realised that trying to use video games to tell stories the same way that books or films do was a lost cause, and focused instead on crafting organic, player-directed simulations with more intuitive interfaces and better production values compared to their 90s forebears. This would mean that the last ten years of AAA games still doing the lame "Hollywood action movie but you're the main character" thing isn't evidence that video games have lost their way or are on the verge of another crash: it just means that the lumbering AAA game studios haven't cottoned on to the new hot trend, which is intentionally narrative-light organic player-directed simulations. If this were the case, it would be a fascinating narrative to describe the last decade and a half.
There is also the issue of budgets. It costs more and more to make a video game. How big did a studio need to be to make a JRPG for the ps2 vs how big does it need to be for the ps4. As it gets more costly to make a console game the harder it is to justify taking a risk on an interesting narrative. I loved Specs Ops: The Line and I maintain that it's the best way to read Heart of Darkness. But I simply can't imagine it getting made in this environment.
PC gaming is getting better and better though, if only through accumulation over time. And if you consider visual novels like Utawarerumono to count as video games then things have never been better. More top 5% of visual novels are out then ever before. I remember when it was regarded as an unprecedented victory when we got VNDB's 3rd most highly rated VN (Muv Luv Alternative), let alone the more obscure stuff, or legendary H games like the Rance series, Evenicle, or Dohna Dohna.
On a more narrative stories with plots, etc point we did get Disco Elysium, which was pure lightening in a bottle never to be regained. If you have not played it before it simply must be experienced. Suzerain may count, although it's characters are more expressions of political factions that exist and the real character is the nature of Turkiye post WW-2. But books have used individuals to express such situations for a very long time now.
Overall I think both your initial argument and your critique of my own are strong.
Perhaps it's that when graphics were bad and gameplay restricted that one of the only options left was to rely on strong writing. But now that graphics are good pretty much everywhere and gameplay design is a fairly well mastered craft there is just not as much pressure to perform on narrative. But that's just an intuition.
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FWIW on my gut check I didn't really agree with the premise. In addition to your list I would have Last of Us,God of War + GOW Ragnarok, Warcraft 3, Witcher 3, Sekiro, and multiple others in the good story category. And in the old days for every game with a great story you had 5 games like Sims or Roller Coaster Tycoon which were just story-less.
Can't comment, not having played any of them for the reasons outlined in the last paragraph. Pretty much everyone tells me that Last of Us is great, annoying that it still hasn't received a PC port.
Do you mean the sequel? The first game has a remake port on Steam and Epic.
Thanks for the tip, it's not mentioned anywhere on the Wikipedia page.
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I'd like to note that to me this seems like mostly an Anglo problem, and more specifically an American one.
There are well written games and other types of media but they're increasingly, or even generally, produced elsewhere (or by people from elsewhere) despite most games being made in America.
Personally i think it's a combination of a pipeline problem and a cultural problem. Part of the pipeline problem is how much the industry have grown (the quality people are spread too thin) but also the general reputation of the industry. Who with talent and in their right mind would work in gamedev? Especially AAA?
It's kind of similar to online communities, once you reach a scarcity tipping point of quality people then why bother with something that doesn't pay? Especially when you're actively or passively selecting for bad people.
The culture part I'm sure you're all aware of.
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The loss in quality in video games must also be mentioned. I don't know enough about the field to understand how improving technology has changed it; I assume as engines and graphics continue to improve, the demands for their effective functioning also rise, so studios, to a point, need to hire more people than teams of the past. At the same time the lovely little LOZ-riff indie title Tunic was mostly done by 1 guy, and while to modern standards for graphics and length it's unremarkable I do think its brilliance, and of course the other 1-guy masterclass of Stardew Valley reveal the core problem in the gaming industry: too many people.
Halo 3 to the day is one of the most technically impressive games ever made and compared with modern studios it was a skeleton crew of some dozens of staff. The campaign, though quite brief compared to CE and 2, is memorable, has excellent setpieces, and still holds up (just played through it again.) After the campaign, their attention was not spared when it came to the multiplayer. First was a robust replay system, it wasn't the first replay system, but it was fantastically done, I filled my 360 hard drive with noscope clips I was able to pull via downloading the replay at the end of a match, then cutting the segment from the replayed game, often recording at additional angles for pierce-through-multikills or sniper ricochet shots. Then there was the excellent map editor, allowing significant customization of what weapons and vehicles spawned on maps, where players spawned on maps, and the gameplay rules for those maps. Where Zombies had been a popular custom game mode in Halo 2, they gave it full support in the Halo 3 mode of infection and variants of maps designed to have fortified positions from which to mow down the endlessly-respawning zed team. The real meat of these were basically gone at the launch of Halo 4 despite it also being on the 360 and "despite" them having significantly more employees. Again I don't know the field, but I know enough to know about Brook's Law. What are all those extra hires really doing?
Overproduction of managers/elite is a known thing, I'm sure someone else has made the observation of this really seeming to be a problem in everything, overproduction of ostensibly qualified workers for every sector. Video games went from very niche to an industry where single companies could make a billion dollars per month, it's no wonder so many people started graduating after an education pipeline meant to get them in the industry, in whatever specialty. People who didn't really want to work on video games, but think it's something they could do because they like video games, or people who didn't think much of their options. A lot of them being "writers" who would prefer to be authors or working in Hollywood, but while they don't have the chops to do any of that, they have a degree and they know someone in the industry or especially they fill the right checkboxes, and they're hired in and their incompetence makes it into the game, either in the writing or downstream of their slow and low-quality asset/programmatic work on the game.
All that said, my GOAT stack is the probably-normiecore of Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, and Red Dead 2. It's a good time to be playing games, industry struggles ignored.
tl;dr: IMVHO, because of the size of the industry, too many people resort into working in video games rather than the earlier days of the field being mostly obsessive nerds powerfully driven to create
Also, AI is coming for video games just like it's coming for Hollywood. Bug testing and QA may never go away, but in our lives we will soon enough see a wide field of auteurs like Eric Barone and Andrew Shouldice, except they'll be putting out titles on the level of Deus Ex and Halo.
You mean marginal utility of labor goes negative. Econ 101 stuff.
I'm not disparaging you for citing it, but I am a bit dissapointed that there are so many "<Pronoun>'s Laws" out there that are just reskinned version of a well known generalized pattern.
The global knowledge base needs a refactoring just about now. There's too much redundancy.
Fuck you Brooke. I can reskin econ 101 shit too and apply it to Basket weaving or rice farming, or something. Where is my Wikipedia page ?
Probably generally fair but as Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man-Month in 1975 it seems appropriate in talking about overstaffing issues in software projects nearly 50 years later.
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It may be related to Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths. When video games were a niche interest, the only people making them were nerds who were passionate about what they were making and had a vision in mind. Over time, the medium swelled into a multi-billion dollar industry, which attracted a bunch of people who didn't care about the video games for their own sake and were only in it for the money/as a stepping stone in their careers/using video games as a vehicle to advance a social agenda/all of the above. I don't know if this is true of video games, but it is definitely true of video game journalism.
This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing (no one is more passionate about their art than some dork writing Sonic fan fiction), but a clumsy story written by someone who cares about what they're writing at least has an endearing quality compared to a mediocre story written by someone who only cares about the paycheque.
Do you mean sufficient effect?
For Sonic fan fiction, I bring you the lowest depths to which the human mind and soul can sink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0
I think it's possible to write a great story when you don't feel emotionally invested in it, and equally possible to write a terrible story in spite of feeling very emotionally invested in it.
The former is definitely conceptually possible, but I am not sure it has ever happened. I think Dostoevsky claimed he was more or less a mercenary writer to pay off his debts, but I don't believe him.
I think you have to simulate invested characters in your mind in order to produce compelling characters. Whether simulating someone with emotions means you have their emotions is a matter of developmental psychology. IE Robert Kegan's work describes psychological development is the progression towards turning essential aspects of self into mutable tool use. Once you've done that, you can embody investment without yourself identifying with that investment.
LLMs can (sometimes, within a good framework) produce compelling writing, but only by simulating compelling characters. (personally I think LLMs can be invested by some relevant functional definition. But to anyone else this serves as a proof by counterexample.)
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Then your hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
The first example to come to mind is Chinatown, widely considered Roman Polanski's best film, which he himself said that he took on as a commercial project only, as a favour to Jack Nicholson.
Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were paid by the line.
To quote TV Tropes (I've never read Pet Sematary but my understanding is that it's considered one of King's best novels):
The Money, Dear Boy article includes the following examples:
There are dozens more.
Pet Semetary is good, back before King's ego went the size of Jupiter and he got Too Big To Edit, and way before he finally ran out of inspiration (which is not to say that some of his latest novels haven't been good, there are a couple where he's shifted style to a smaller scale, but he's no longer the giant beast of horror as before).
I loved the ending, because you could see bad choices coming from a mile off, and yet it was understandable why the main character made that (very, very) bad choice. And King didn't wimp out of giving us that ending.
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I believe that there are writers primarily motivated by money, but that's not the same as being emotionally uninvested in a story. (This is distinct from being passionate, in a strong sense, about the story.) However, yes, I think it's hard for someone to prove that they aren't emotionally invested at all. How does one prove such a thing? And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?
Why not? There are lots of stories which I understand perfectly well but which leave me cold.
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I don't know why you can't just take their word for it. In any other profession, when someone says "I got into this line of work because I'm good at it and it pays well", we generally take that at face value (surely no one believes that every doctor went to medical school because they "want to help people" - the ones volunteering for MSF, sure, but not a dermatologist in the Hamptons). Why, as a culture, are we married to this romantic ideal of the tortured artist, slitting his wrists over the typewriter in pursuit of his muse? Why do I have to believe that the artist sacrificed something of himself in order to produce his masterwork? My opinion of how entertaining a film Dirty Harry is isn't changed by the knowledge that Don Siegel only directed it for the money, and I don't see that my opinion should have changed.
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I think you touched upon one valid point, which is the size of projects, and that the man in charge is rarely the one with a comprehensive creative vision, and even if, has too much on his hands to see it through.
But as for generalized conclusions about the decline of culture at large - probably true, but on a longer time scale, and not the immediate cause of the sharp decline in video game writing quality.
I offer a different hypothesis: The game makers of old made games from first principles, the game makers of today make games that imitate the games they know. They have played games for decades now, since they were old enough, have consumed endlessly, and whatever unique creative ideas they might have had have since been sandblasted to dust by a thousand consumer products having gone throgh their brains. They think in terms of what they have experienced hitherto, which is games based on games based on games, and their writing likewise.
Nobody needs to explain or justify why games have hitpoints, third-person reticules, experience points and levels, ultimate abilities, hero classes, zombies, magic that produces differently colored fireballs, scientific anomalies that manifest as colorful particle systems, star lanes, energy shields...all of this is assumed away as the baseline stuff of our consumer experience, and it goes without saying that when something "new" is made, it is made out of all the old that constitutes the entirety of our experiences. And that old used to be from different media, and so had to be adapted to fit a creative vision that sprang form outside of the gaming world. But now the old is just well-trodden ground, trod again, and again, and again. I don't need to explain to you why you are the chosen one with quasi-magical powers who can slaughter hundreds of meaningless enemies - it's what you came here for. Whatever plot I provide to justify it is just background noise.
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Video game writing is one thing. Have you seen Hollywood recently?
I went to the cinema recently and saw two movies. One is Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. It's Kaiju Wrestlemania, the monster fights are pretty fun, Kong at one point beats a monkey with another monkey. Entertainment. And in between it all is some of the most agonizing, painfully bad human-scale plots, characters and exposition I've seen. Granted, it's a movie about a nuclear dinosaur fighting a giant monkey, it's not exactly somewhere people look for good writing. It's going to make a lot of money.
The other was a matinee showing, I woke up early, offset a healthy morning walk with some unhealthy breakfast, went to an AM showing of the only flick that still had the discount pricing. Some anime flick called Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle. It's an animated movie about high school volleyball featuring two teams playing a single best-of-3 match in the lower bracket of a tournament.
After finishing that movie, I came out of it gobsmacked. Not because it was great or anything, but because this nothing anime movie from a series I don't think is any good managed to clear the what seems like a ridiculous bar, these days, of being a human story about humans doing human things. You know, a story featuring characters who drink water and breathe air. Humans.
It's not that Japan is somehow exceptional at this, it just seems like Hollywood has entirely forgotten what humans are like. How they talk, how they think, how they react around other people. What they care about. It seems like the ability to model human beings, or write from their perspectives, is completely missing.
When Hollywood writes characters these days, they almost inevitably end up as one of the following:
Or some combination of the above.
To go back to GxK: the cast of characters in that movie exploring Hollow Earth are as follows. The adoptive mother of a mute child, who is having trouble connecting to her adoptive daughter (probably the closest to an actual person, cliche). Angry security man who is rough, tough, and angry at everyone for no apparent reason (cliche, cartoon character). Weird surfer Australian hippie kaiju vet heavily implied to be adoptive mother's ex boyfriend (cartoon character). Mute girl who can talk to Kong (plot device). Chubby black podcast conspiracy nerd trying to get views on a podcast and complaining about trolls (cartoon character, obnoxious, cliche).
None of these people are people. I don't know if they drink water or breathe air. The podcast guy looked and acted like if you cut him he'd bleed Monster Energy. None of them talk like human beings. Their dialogue is either snappy oneliners, built for movie trailers, or clunky exposition. It's telling that the movie's best sequences featured exclusively kaiju, had no dialogue whatsoever, and props to the special effects team - Kong was capable of emoting and communicating who he was and his thoughts and feelings to the audience far better than any of these cardboard cutouts in the shape of human actors.
Haikyuu: The Dumpster Battle opens with a slow, almost arthouse-movie-esque sequence, with things framed off center or slightly out of frame, where a dispassionate character who doesn't care about the sport of volleyball at all is lost on his way getting to a practice bootcamp and doesn't consider it a big deal. His phone is out of power. And instead of trying to find his way to bootcamp with any urgency, he sits down and we hear the sound of a handheld video game console powering up.
I almost wanted to jump up in my chair and point at the fucking screen, as if Hollywood were watching: It do be like that. In a sequence that's two minutes long at maximum we have established who this kid is, what he's like, his attitude, and what he cares about. Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings? Are they just bad at modeling what those people are like? Do they know any? In lieu of this, I have to conclude that the writers genuinely do believe human beings are either cliches, cartoon characters, or obnoxious.
My working theory is that the ability of western writers to model other human beings seems stunted. The current crop are narcissists, incompetent, or incapable of basic human empathy. Either that, or whatever they put down doesn't survive peer and funding review.
Beyond that, the other takeaway I had is that Hollywood seems to have completely lost the ability to impose any sort of meaning on their stories. I don't mean in a didactic or parable like sense, but I mean in the sort of literal 'here are the story stakes' meaning.
GxK, spoilers, has stakes like the world ending in a new potential ice age. H:TDB is a sports movie about a single lower bracket game in a high school tournament. Somehow, the latter was a story that felt like it had higher stakes. Every hard rally meant something, every small micro-victory and every way characters and their ideologies were tested felt impactful and meaningful.
The culprit is overprofessionalization. Writters are now expected to go to film school then try to break into Hollywood.
Back when things were less competitive it was common for writers to serve in the military, travel around the US or overseas, and read a lot of random books.
Now they do professional schooling and then spend years dealing with obnoxious people in LA.
This is especially noticable in sci fi genre writting. The writers of new Star Wars and Star Trek have seen all the space battle movies but don't have any relatives with military experience and haven't watch many war documentaries. So all the commanding officers come off as a mix of incompetent and unbeliveable.
Writing engaging characters requires a broad mix of lived experience and reading.
Of course studio executives are similarly isolated from big chunks of human experience. They spent their lives viciously clawing their way to the top.
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I'm pretty late seeing this but Haikyuu is a pretty well regarded anime based off a manga that was top 5 in sales in 2020 and top 10 a few other times.
Its also in the well worn Japanese sports genre where the artists and writers have really honed their craft as to how to make something as mundane as high school sports interesting.
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I really liked your breakdowns of the characterization. I agree that blockbusters are absolutely willing to toss in stock characters and skimp on realistic human dialogue.
Thing is, stock characters have worked since at least the commedia dell’arte. They’re a very efficient way to skip exposition and set expectations for a character. Anime examples abound. Clearly, a script can have familiar archetypes alongside human dialogue…Can.
This feels Too Good To Check. It would be convenient if we could write off the people who produce bad entertainment as moral mutants, but is it likely?
Now this is probably true. No matter the capabilities of individual writers, there’s got to be some mechanism keeping blockbusters from having good characters. Here’s a few possibilities.
I lean towards 3 or 4. It would suck if quality (as we understand it) was different than quality (as the market understands it), but…it also wouldn’t really be unique. If you can’t put a price on it, the market isn’t going to take it into account. Option 4 is more optimistic; maybe that makes it cope? Still, I can’t rule out the idea that these people really want to make something good, and are only temporarily barking up the wrong tree.
My comment here mentions Dead Space, which I find to be possibly the best example of the bizarre shit coming out of writing teams now. To reiterate, the people making the Dead Space Remake clearly loved the original game and endeavored to remake it in about as respectful-to-the-source-content a way they could, and I think that it was a resounding success - except for the writing. Not only did they make significant additions to the story that dilute the original formula and make it feel not nearly as tight, they started radically changing what was already there, to wit: One of the characters you see in game has been made a hypergamous bisexual, evidenced by the fact that he refers to several of the necromorphs (monsters born from the crew of this ship that's only been together a few months at most) as "old boyfriends". None of this existed in the original game. Many characters are changed in how they look to the point where they're unrecognizable. Furthermore, many of their styles look like they belong on people from Los Angeles marketing firms. I will note it's not literally everyone - the main character, Isaac Clarke, is completely changed in his appearance from the original series, apparently to match the face of the voice actor, and he looks like a more generic looking white guy. That aside, his characterization is still different (rather than being aware of his breaking sanity and fighting it, he's instead rewritten as a deranged lunatic).
Given the fact that these changes were made across the board for everyone except the most central characters, I actually don't find a Sweet Baby-esque motive to making these changes - namely, an ulterior pandering or cover-your-ass angle to it. I don't think they're people who hate the hobby, and want to destroy it because it didn't appeal to them, as is often the indictment of culture warriors talking about video games. The passion exuded from this project in every other aspect, and the way they changed the characters so universally, makes me think they're "true believers" of the fact that their way of viewing the world right now is objectively correct and would simply be a boring fact of the future.
In a way, it makes me hate it a lot less, because it feels like I'm seeing how these people genuinely view the world. In another, it's a lot worse than it simply being a grift, because how myopic do you have to be to think everyone in the future will hold your exact belief system, straight down to the hair styles that are so often correlated with it? Pair that with most of the new voice actors really really sucking, and sounding like mid-20s kids, and it really makes me think something has gone very very wrong with creatives, insulating them from having a realistic sampling of the world. This, I think, was my deeper thesis, and my original comment sort of obfuscated it while trying to control for other changes in the gaming landscape that have affected game writing. Contrast that with the original Dead Space character designs, which I think are a lot more timeless (maybe Kendra Daniels's hair looks a bit early 2000s, but everyone else has very utilitarian, timeless styles that are certainly not indicative of the subset of "creatives" of the time).
I've written off the entire sector.
If it's AAA, I'll play it if you pay me. Unless it's from Japan ofc.
Is Indie really better in that respect? I'm currently playing Outward and enjoying the gameplay, but in terms of setting it has quite a few insufferably woke moments. Before, it was Battletech, which is also very woke. It just seems to be in the water supply at the moment.
Being non AAA is no guarantee of not being woke, because a lot of devs are normies, and woke is in the air.
Better odds: non-western developers who aren't woke. There's a few RW or die-hard liberal guys making games in the West. Also Outward was published by a major studio, so..
AAA, or published by a big publisher almost guarantees it's going to be woke. For this reason people are worried about new Kingdome Come game.
There may even be devs barely aware of 'woke'. E.g. the guys who developed Dyson Space Program, a 3d riff on Factorio are likely Chinese who grind code all the time and may not even be aware of it.
I guess Outward was a worse example than i thought. It definitely "feels" indie in many ways, but probably is more like A game instead of AAA.
Nevertheless, even if I think about "true" Indie such as Trese Brothers, I struggle to think of examples that aren't noticably woke unless they literally have no story involving humanoids whatsoever (and even then, they sometimes somehow manage).
Well, non-woke story having games I know of are Highfleet (made by a single Russian orthodox programmer) and Underrail (from Serbia).
There's also Starsector, a spaceship tactical/RPG game with a storyline. Russians, again.
Also there's the Colony Ship RPG. Made by 'Irontower Studio' whose website says this:
And so on.
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That's the main problem today; movies aren't written to tell stories, they're written to reference other movies/TV shows. They're written as pitches: "Imagine X and Y, but it's like Z!" The script is one-liners punctuated by the Big CGI Scenes (be those explosions, fights, battles, whatever). There isn't plot to speak of, the purpose of the plot is to get the characters from point A to point B (quipping and one-lining all the way) so they can do Big Thing, then move on to do Next Big Thing.
I've excoriated Rings of Power enough on here before, but that was the major problem with the showrunners: they haven't done anything. They have a writing credit on a reboot Trek script, they've worked on other projects that never went anywhere, and they've been around as rewriters for other scripts. That's it.
So they don't know how to make a show by telling a story. They throw together stock tropes for the characters ("Galadriel, but back when she's, like, young and feisty and full of fight, GirlBoss!") and have big set-piece scenes in mind, but they don't make connections or care about filling in the holes.
So the Númenorean army can set sail on three small ships that get to Middle-earth in a matter of days, to unload a huge cavalry charge (ripping off the ride of the Rohirrim, what us?) that ends up in precisely the right place at precisely the right moment to save the day, and never mind how unlikely this is, how much time is supposed to have passed (not helped by cutting between 'scenes happening at night in this place' and 'scenes happening during the day in that place'), or where all those horses and soldiers fit on the three small ships.
And it shows. That's what got the show the most criticism: a lot of nothing happened at great length, then they crammed in the very necessary parts in the last fifteen minutes.
This is their idea for season two Sauron: "He'll be like Walter White or Tony Soprano". No originality of their own, just copying successful properties. And that's what modern movie and TV scripts are: copy what went before and was successful. So they end up not writing humans as they really behave, but copies of characters that are copies of characters that are copies of characters from TV and movies.
I'm not convinced that there is such a thing as "enough" in this case. Please keep it coming. :D
I'm waiting for Season Two. We may possibly get it by the end of the year, or not. They're giving us two Saurons - first season original character Halbrand "bet you never saw this twist coming! oh, you did..." Sauron and finally because they blinkin' have to, Annatar Sauron (played by a different character, naturally, and I don't actually mind that they cast a British-Indian actor in the role because at least in canon, the Valar and Maiar can be any shape or form they please). Crazier rumours give us a possible third Sauron in the shape of "Remember Celeborn, Galadriel's husband? Well never mind, she didn't remember him either, but now he's back! Except in another stunning plot twist, it's Sauron in disguise yet again!!"
I'm not sure I believe that one, not because it's beyond the bounds of possibility (the showrunners seem to still be in charge and Eru knows they're idiotic enough to think this is an amazing ploy) but that it's too good to be true. I want to see the dumpster fire they make out of season two (no way this turkey is going to five seasons). Can they go even better than "The knife ears are taking our jerbs"?
Fools be talkin' 'bout darker, grittier season two but I want to know: will they give us Orc War Banner Celebrimbor? Huh? Huh? Have they the guts to do that? (Given what they've already done to the character, being tortured to death by Annatar would be a merciful release).
See what I mean about no originality, just copying older, successful properties? Though at least he's implicitly admitting season one was not canonical and they finally, reluctantly, have to give the fans what they want: tell the dang story as it stands, not with your mystery box twists.
Gosh dang it, I want to see the Dwarves of Khazad-dum marching out, by their intervention saving Elrond and Celeborn, fighting a withdrawal back to Khazad-dum and then slamming the doors shut right in Sauron's face, but will we get it? Nah, they'll probably decide that Galadriel needs to one-shot the lake monster instead or something.
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The theory I've heard is that they can't sell the stories afterward.
Currently they're making their profits off blockbusters, where after putting a quarter billion dollars into production and marketing you've got too much on the line to risk your dialogue not being trailer-worthy and lowest-common-denominator approved, and if you know your best sequences are going to be CGI kaiju fighting, why would you shorten those just to buy time to make a side character slightly more well-rounded? But mid-budget films, the ones where they used to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get back a few more tens of millions, aren't working out so well as they used to ... and yet it's the mid-budget range that used to occasionally spiral into massive box office successes and Oscar takeaways for the biggest winners, because they were in the sweet spot where they were cheap enough for directors to take risks, too cheap to replace characterization with special effects, and yet expensive enough to exhibit real production quality behind the risky ideas that worked out.
I have no idea whether this theory is actually true; there doesn't seem to be nearly as much overlap as I'd like between "people who actually know something about the movie industry" and "people who back up their theories with quantitative analyses".
Here’s Matt Damon explaining that the death of DVD sales killed mid budget movies that took risks.
He doesn’t give quantitative analysis.
He also doesn't explain how come those movies were getting made before DVDs ever became a thing. It's funny how he talks about the 90s when the DVD only became a thing in 1997 and took 2-3 years to really get popular.
Why wouldn't it apply to all home video sales rather than specifically DVDs and only DVDs?
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My working hypothesis on bad writing is at least in part due to the hyper-professionalization of movies and games. In both cases, the people making them don’t come from all walks of life. They come from a rather insular world of people who have gone through specialized training at university, and they then go on to live in the same town and hang out mostly with other people like themselves who went to the same professional schools and so on. They’re rarely if ever outside that bubble. They rarely know anyone who came from outside that bubble. And as this goes on for generations, the lack of contact with the normie world makes it impossible to create movies and tv and games that feel realistic. Nobody in Hollywood shoots guns, and probably very rarely would they even know anyone who collects or uses them. When it comes to writing a story about the kind of person that owns or shoots guns, they aren’t referencing their own lived experience with gun owners. They’re referencing other works about the topic, they’re referencing their political views about guns and the people who own them, and maybe stereotyping they’ve seen about gun owners. That doesn’t allow for much depth. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy — every step away from the real thing makes it less like a real person and thus less interesting.
You're onto something. The goal of fiction isn't to recreate reality, but I think the further the creative class gets from the working class the worse mass-market entertainment gets. You have to really dig around or look at niche works, or be able to swallow pretentiousness that hasn't been eclipsed by the creator's ego.
Ghostbusters (1984) is a story about schlubby guys getting jobs as supernatural firefighters and pest control. The villain of that story isn't Gozer, it's the EPA inspector who has no clue what they actually do. More and more, the creative class seem to be EPA inspectors.
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See also this article. TL;DR: National Book Award winners (and American novelists in general, by extension) used to come from all walks of life, but in recent years winners and nominees have been dominated almost to the exclusion of all else by college-educated novelists who have completed MFAs. This has the effect of making recent acclaimed literary novels insular and hermetic, with little of the grit, colour or life experience of literary novels from decades past.
The classic story of Chuck Palahniuk being a diesel mechanic while writing Fight Club. Frankly a grittier man than some other authors.
I totally agree. The stuff that grabbed me about Fight Club, and The Martian is just how close Palahniuk and Weir seemed to be able to get the mindset of ordinary working class people stuck in extraordinary circumstances. A lot of sci-fi seems to assume that everyone is PMC and that ships in space or colonies are going to be large and clean and have lots of cool gear. They’re cruise ships built for luxury run by people who cry but rarely experience a real hardship.
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Whenever I watch a film directed by John Carney, I'm left with this very unsettling feeling. Watching his films makes me feel like he's never actually met another human being in his life, that his entire knowledge of what people are like comes from watching other people's movies.
This wasn't always true of Christopher Nolan (the performances in Memento are remarkably naturalistic in spite of the contrived plot), but has become the case over time. No one in Inception, Interstellar, Tenet or Oppenheimer talks or acts like a real person (particularly damning in the latter case, given that 95% of the characters are based on real people who actually existed).
The weirdification of Nolan's films has always astounded me. How could someone who started so competently and strongly, and was given so much due to that success, essentially only go downward with regards to his portrayal of human beings on screen? You can even see it as early as The Dark Knight, where things happen for the convenience of the plot, and not because they make sense. Actually, as I detailed in one of my comments, I can forgive that as long as it's effective, and it was. However, by The Dark Knight Rises it really became a mess when you asked even one question about how things worked.
I will slightly disagree, in that a good few of the characters in
InceptionInterstellar feel very real, but it still does have that undercurrent of "Nolan thinks he's deeper than he is". I also, as my OP indicated, have a very strong space/sci-fi bias. Even with that, I think Memento and The Prestige are by far Nolan's best. What a triumph The Prestige is.That and Memento are probably the only films of his I'd put in the W column without major qualifications.
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Oppenheimer was not evenly awful about this, which is the sadder part. A couple of the scientists (and notably Kitty) were fine. Oppenheimer was being portrayed as a weird autist. By far the worst thing about that movie was about how Nolan portrayed his relationship with Tatlock; it was like watching two wooden blocks rubbing together. The infamous Bhagavad Gita line is somehow... a seduction tactic? I vaguely remember some backlash over it.
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I think this is my favorite comment I’ve yet read on this forum. You totally and succinctly understand that almost orgasmic feeling of relief when finding that one new piece of art that isn’t completely pathetic.
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I think games have just scaled as a project to the point that there's too many cooks in the kitchen. Also credentialism likely trends more formulaic compared to when even majorish projects would prettymuch be 'somebody's cousin + moderate drug use = Elder Scrolls mythos'
That makes sense. Writing a coherent, solid scenario when you have 1 motivated person, compared to 50 scriptwriters and 10 art directors?
I feel like terrible stories in older games were easier to ignore/part of the appeal, too. Plenty of games where if you ignored a few pages in the manual and got down to Rip & Tearing it was a lot easier to just play. Compared to today's unskippable cutscenes.
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I don't think we can separate the bad writing from broader quality issues. Take Battlefield 2042 for instance - there was no scoreboard in a team shooter. It was buggy and broken on release. Halo Infinite, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077 itself (though they later improved it), Overwatch 2, Starfield... These are major titles from formerly well-respected publishers yet many had fewer features than their predecessors, released in a shocking state or were heavily and aggressively monetized.
Halo Infinite on release was lacking custom games, no automatic rejoin, had only 10 maps (to Halo 2's 12), no region selection, no campaign co-op, no anti-cheat... I haven't played it, just watched a video ripping into it. The gameplay was apparently good but everything else wasn't: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y-VnT1QNWPg
It's not that Boeing's issues are localized solely to the bolt-screwer-in workers, there are problems in upper management and operations. Likewise in games, it's not just writing but broader issues across companies. Small, talented and motivated teams can and do make great games! Noita, Dyson Sphere Program, Grim Dawn, Ultrakill... Hey, Slay the Princess has a great story and that was 2 people! It's the big players that have been suffering. They are supposed to have the resources, time and experience to make great games yet often seem to fail. Everything about Starfield was bad AFAIK - story, graphics, gameplay, everything.
Bad games and bad writing are like peas in a pod. Go have a look at Hyenas, how everyone was laughing at such a stupid, ugly, cringeworthy concept that apparently cost Creative Assembly/Sega a hundred million. Bad designers had a bad idea and executed it poorly - failure across the board.
Wasn't TF2 super buggy on its initial release, or do I have that wrong?
Team Fortress 2? It did have some particular glitches and exploits, but they were patched in a reasonable time, IIRC.
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Don't know, I can't find any evidence of it. Metacritic of 92, 93% positive on steam. Looks pretty good!
Meanwhile Overwatch 2 is at... 17% positive on steam. 2042 is at 45%. Fallout 76 and Cyberpunk seem to have redeemed themselves after a bad launch though, as did No Man's Sky.
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Just to point out the obvious: Macs in the 90s were very much not the main gamer platform. It was almost a joke, how few games got ported to the mac. I mostly used macs in school, where I think it was seen as a plus that the only "games" on the mac were educational games. Instead it had its own, somewhat artsy-tartsy culture. I've never heard of those games you mentioned, but i'm not surprised the platform might have attracted some games with more sophisticated writing than the mainstream of Nintendo and MS-DOS.
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content. And so much of that content is just blatantly regurgitated from the limited Nerd Canon of Lord of the Rings/DnD/Star Wars/Star Trek, it's long since been exhausted, and the whole medium of "interactivity" just doesn't fit with having a fixed pre-written story.
Ahem
Ever heard of Sierra Entertainment or Lucasarts classic games? Star Control 2? Ultima IV? Fallout? Baldur's Gate?
yeah I've heard of them and I greatly enjoyed most of those. But looking back at them now as an adult, I don't see them as great writing. It seems more like stage directions to tell you what's going on in the game and keep you on track. Not to mention: it's all fantasy tropes that have been done a million times. Eg:
https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/media/screens/full/ultima_iv_-quest_of_the_avatar/ultima_iv-_quest_of_the_avatar_04.png Thanks for telling me it's a gypsy caravan, in case I couldn't have guessed just from the picture
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YJC1C8Tm3S0s8JptmC0V3k01K35JRIp5r0j8buUXOi3Gih97ggYLbBGSVMOkbDOZf8CcTg7jcJAmOxknvnTghy2jak0XMPQkn7XnQoJMvEEHEJ4qojGOGmtCybaJ1xPhUw: Explaining that we're on the edge of the map and can't move any further
https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/baldur_s_gate_retro_4.jpg.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp Is this dialogue? Or just random character lines to narrate the battle?
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Fallout-Harold-Dialogue-Cropped.jpg Infodumping the backstory
I shouldn't pick on these because the genre forces the writing to go a certain way. But still... you can see why none of this is exactly prizewinning literature, right?
This is like complaining that on page 83 of your printed book, there's the number 83 written in the corner and you think that nobody in the book has a reason to say "83" in character.
Even if it's a character who speaks the line (I can't access the link), that's a genre convention and has no bearing on writing quality.
It's a character, yeah. your magical owl companion in King's Quest 5 says "There's nothing a hot, dry desert further west. Most people avoid it, because there are bandits out there! If you insist on going, I'll wait for you HERE!"
It's just a very unsubtle way to tell the player "you can't leave the fixed game area," but dressed up in some fantasy cliches (why is the hot, dry desert full of bandits? How do they make a living if everyone avoids it...?). And most of the game writing is like that: engineering to serve the purposes of the game.
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I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends. I also played through D1 recently after maybe 15+ years or so, and found the writing and atmosphere holds up superbly even without all the extra worldbuilding from the printed pages.
When people say D1/D2 are better written than the following sequels, there's often some pushback that wants to eagerly point out how little story and dialogue were in those first two games. To which I say "Yes, and how did Blizzard manage to fuck that up so much".
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
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Marathon was basically a Doom clone but for Mac (apologies to any Marathon fans offended by this, but not really). In fact it was developed by Bungie, the same Bungie that went on to make Halo.
And it was a big deal (on Mac) because back then Mac was basically shit tier for gaming if you wanted anything that wasn't educational, adventure or multimedia.
Back then? It's still the case today. Mac is the worst computer platform for gaming. Windows is king, Linux at least has Proton to easily run Windows games, and Mac gets the occasional crumbs that get ported.
It got better (both in ports and native games) in the early 2000s, but then got vastly worse after (ironically) the switch to Intel chips. Once you lost backwards compatibility, and it became clear that Apple had no wish to continue supporting devs, the entire market fell off a cliff. Now there's nothing.
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As regards structural changes in how games are made, I wonder if it would be useful to compare similar works written by the same authors?
To take a straightforward example - has Chris Metzen's writing, for instance, gotten better or worse over time? I'd argue that the original Starcraft has a compelling, well-written plot that serves the needs of its gameplay very well, but that Starcraft II is less well-written. This isn't the case for every mission, and of course some blame might attach to other SC2 authors like Brian Kindregan or James Waugh, but given that SC2's epilogue was all Metzen, and it's by far the worst part of that game's story, and of course he was involved in overall story development, it still seems a reasonable comparison.
Likewise his other franchises - World of Warcraft infamously has a horrible, broken plot, but how does it compare to Metzen's works in the 90s and early 2000s, like Warcraft II or Warcraft III? On the one hand, as much as WC3 is remembered as having a good plot, if you read it with clear eyes it's obvious that its script is extremely rough. (I am generally a big advocate for only judging game stories in the context of gameplay, rather than ripped out and read in isolation, but even just on the line-to-line level, a lot of this dialogue is just bad.) Perhaps you could make a case that Metzen's story writing ability was always relatively mediocre, especially when it comes to naturalistic dialogue (certainly his biggest weakness), and as such the restricted environments of WC2 or SC1 played to his strengths and concealed his weaknesses.
So if we consider a few possibilities, it strikes me as plausible that he hasn't gotten worse, but rather the more high-fidelity environments of modern games have made his shortcomings more evident. There might be something like the shift between theatre and stage - in SC1, for instance, detailed character acting is impossible, so every character speaks in long, hammy monologues, and dramatic speeches and over-the-top voice-acting need to carry most of the personality. Characters cannot emote any other way. Metzen's writing suits this style quite well, or perhaps that style trained him at an early stage to write in this super-broad, hammy way. However, this style is much less well-suited for a game like SC2, which has cutscenes shot much more like an animated TV show.
Anecdotally I feel like I see a similar transition in other game series, even if writers there have changed over time. If I compare the writing in Baldur's Gate II to the writing in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's hard to resist the feeling that there's been a significant step down somewhere. Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse. (Admittedly for setting this might be in part because BG2 was directly based on the extremely-high-quality setting material of AD&D2e, which for my money remains the apogee of D&D worldbuilding.)
Or even if we step away from RPGs - you're correct that going from Marathon to Halo Infinity feels like a major decline, but even within the same series, I'd argue that if you play the original Halo: Combat Evolved today, its writing is remarkably snappy and evocative, and compares favourably to its successors. As the series grew more popular, it also grew more bloated? Continuity bloat in long-running series can be a serious issue - this may also be one of Metzen's issues with WoW.
But I'm not sure continuity bloat can cover everything. If you go from the original Fallout (1997) to Fallout 4 (2015), there's a decline that I don't think you can blame entirely on franchise bloat. It might just be a less competent writing team (especially since New Vegas was so high-quality); I'd buy "Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer are just good writers, and most people aren't as good" as an explanation (cf. recent well-written games by them such as Sawyer's Pentiment) in that specific case, but there may be other industry-wide trends as well.
So while part might be just that I remember good writing from the 90s but not the bad, I would also speculate that the changing nature of game writing due to technological shifts are a factor, as is the natural course of franchise decline and continuity bloat. Most long-running series, and this goes for literature, film, television, etc., decline in quality over time, and games are no different.
I think that's mostly because Baldur's Gate III is a Larian game, not D&D game. If you've played their Divinity: Original Sin games, you'll immediately recognise the style. It's a Larian game (with their specific tropes) with the D&D mechanics just layered on.
I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.
You do get to run around and explore a bit, but it pretty much does lead you along the line straight to the finish. Replay value is in spinning up different characters and choosing "am I going to be good or evil this time round?" I had fun, but I'm a filthy casual and not a hardcore gamer or a D&D player, so I imagine the experience is different there.
How would you say it compares to BG1 or BG2? Do you think it would appeal to the kind of person who enjoyed those games in the 90s?
This may hinge on two things.
Are you a devotee of RTWP? Then BG3 is an abomination (I personally prefer turn-based).
Do you like or tolerate DnD post-Critical Role, or do you find the sensibilities it has developed to be subtly but omnipresently obnoxious? I'm not well-versed in the franchise, but it doesn't look like BG3 matches the tone of the original games based on some writing samples.
I'm a semi-fan of RPGs, although I'm not good at them. Given their lengths and complexities, I really only have the appetite for one RPG on occasion every few years. And if I'm going to spend multiple hours and nights with one, I need an interesting world to retain me. I don't know where people stand on POE these days, but that managed to hold my interest even after the combat started getting sloggy and boring. FO1 is still my gold standard.
But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word. Clearly some people love it for those reasons, but I must have read a dozen pieces about how 'amazing' BG3's narrator is ("Because it's just like having a DM, guys!"), and to me it just seems irritating and pointless. They understand that cRPGs don't need 'DMs', right? You're playing the game, why would you need it described to you?
I'm in group two. I'm all right with real-time - I didn't mind the later Dragon Age games - but I really don't like the tone and aesthetic of 5e D&D. It's hard to find an actual word for this, but there's the snarky tone, there's a kind of millennial/Gen-Z atmosphere of taking nothing too seriously, and the prominent presence of things like tieflings. (Yes, Haer'Dalis was a tiefling in BG2, but I mean the very standard sexy red-skin-and-tail-and-horns tiefling design that's everywhere now.) I can't define it all that well, but anything pre-3e wasn't afraid to be sincere or even corny, and I find that tone is missing.
BG1 and BG2 contained jokes. I can't deny that. But there's a sensibility that I struggle to put into words. Maybe this sensibility is related to streamers like Critical Role. I don't know, because I've never watched an RPG stream, and frankly think the idea sounds awful and unpleasant. But maybe they were a contributor to a shift like that?
But certainly the reason I steered away from BG3 is because I thought it looked like 2020s-WotC-D&D, rather than 1990s-TSR-D&D. It didn't look like Baldur's Gate.
Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.
Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.
That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.
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Yeah, I know what you mean. I like BG3 well enough, but it feels like it's trying to very consciously emphasize its D&D heritage. For example, the way every skill check brings up a big dramatic die roll animation. It also annoys me that they lean into popular concepts of what D&D is like (but which are actually false), such as natural 1/20 rolls having an effect on skill checks.
I wish that they would spend less energy on the "it's D&D!!!" schtick, and just be ok with the fact that it's a computer game. But maybe people love that stuff, IDK.
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Never played them, so I have no idea. Reading discussion about it, it's allegedly very different from the preceding games in that series.
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With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton passage somewhere about age and fatigue in a society. A society created last week might have very high average age, and be senescent and likely to die soon; a society created a thousand years ago might be full of vigorous members of a young age, and set for the future. I wonder if something similar might apply - the more a people's storytelling is obsessed with the young, the new, the innovation, the deconstructive, the more that's a sign of the people's age and stagnation. Meanwhile retelling the old classics is not a sign of decrepitude, but rather one of vigour.
If nothing else, what types of stories do you tell to children? It's the old classics and the tried-and-true. Daring deconstructions are stories for old, cynical people. The young and vital like to hear the same old thing.
That said, I think there are some older stories out there if you look for them, though sometimes you might have to look to non-Western developers. I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
Funny you mention that. I'd heard enough positive chatter about it that I bought it on sale and jumped in almost completely blind. I've been very pleasantly surprised, and I'm about 4 hours in.
I am tremendously salty about the lack of PC port.
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Side note, why were Mac games seemingly so focused on story compared to some PC games? There's Marathon, Journeyman Project, Myst, that first-person game made by the lead designer of the original Rainbow Six (or was it the founder of Red Storm?), those HyperCard point-and-click games...was it just because Macs had more fixed specs and already had a GUI, focing devs to focus less on how to make tech-demo games and more on how the gameplay experience went?
I think part is that the audience on Mac skewing older and more well-heeled, and that outside of multimedia, Macs were not very well equipped to play games for their era, especially for the price. If you wanted a computer for the kids to play games, there were usually cheaper and better suited alternatives. Cheap 8 bits micros were better for games than early monochrome Macs with only beeps, then Amigas were much better equipped with their dedicated sound and graphics chips, then with 486s and above and VGA and SVGA PCs were able to push more complex graphics.
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I can neither agree or disagree with such a vague assertion. When did the drop off happen? What are some notable examples of poor writing? What sort of games do you actively seek out and which do you avoid?
In creating my own mental shortlist of games I'd recommend on the strength of their writing, I find it starts in the early 00s and continues right up to the present day. This is pretty consistent with the transformation that happened around the turn of the millenium, where genres that had previously included only the bare minimum of writing suddenly had characters the audience cared about and plots that were more than just the connective tissue between levels. Naughty Dog went from Crash Bandicoot to Uncharted in less than a decade, and many studios went through similar if not quite so dramatic shifts.
If I had to offer an explanation as to why you feel writing is worse, it's because it's much, much harder to ignore now. In many games you simply cannot escape voiced dialogue unless the developer had the charity to offer a distinct volume slider for it. Audio logs are fucking everywhere, friendly NPCs chatter, disembodied voices give instructions and repetitive incidental dialogue just won't die (No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses). Probably most egregious are the walk-and-talk segments that Ubisoft (I believe) pioneered, which are the worst incarnation of the unskippable cutscene yet. Maybe they're 'invisible' to the average player which is why they've become the expository vehicle of choice for titles like the new God of War.
Anyway if you're looking for some good writing in a scifi setting I'd recommend The Talos Principle.
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Because it's fucking SEPTEMBER. Everywhere, Everything, all the time, all at once, forever.
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Whoah. I was just about to bring up Mass Effect as an example of popular bad sci-fi. Not simply for its ending, but from structural design perspective (a terribly managed/planned trilogy structure that led to the ending), an inability to stick to character arcs (many reoccuring characters flip from their initial story arcs to fit into the narrative / character appeal niches as needed), it's heavy power fantasy dynamic verging into sycophantism, the tendency to emotionally heal traumatized women by boning them, and so on. A good enough contrarian could even write an amusing spiel on it's fascistic themes and narrative style (though admittedly most who do aren't good enough to pull it off).
That is an entire trope of its own within fanfiction, called the Magical Healing Cock (being fanfiction, it tends to crop up more in slash, but it's found all over).
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A brief defense of Mass Effect, and why I wish more games like Mass Effect would get made.
I grew up a nerd(reading Piers Anthony, playing Samurai Swords, D&D, MTG, etc) who was socially adept enough to pass as a non-nerd. I dressed well, hung out with the cool kids, went to parties, did drugs and had sex. It was all good fun. Sometimes I would also hang out with my nerd friends and go do nerd things. I remember one time going to a Con, dressed well, hair on point, and seeing people walking around in dragon T-shirts and cargo shorts, poorly made cosplay, and the occasional Naruto-headband. As I watched the pockmarked, sweaty nerds, a deep pit opened up inside me. I was jealous. My fashionable sneakers and my tight fitting jeans were all lies, DAMNED LIES. I wanted to be like them, and I was just too scared to admit it, too scared to wear a dragon T-shirt. Well, not anymore.
I enjoy power fantasy. Yes, it is kind of cringy and lame and low-brow, but ima live my truth.
I want to be a kick ass hero who saves the galaxy and fucks hot alien chicks.
ME1 is my favorite game of all time, but I agree with the criticisms of the trilogy as a whole. I feel it went immediately and, ahem, massively downhill from there.
The reason I like ME1 isn't even because of the power fantasy, which I don't care about very much, I desperately want games where the main character isn't all that powerful. I'm actually annoyed we don't see more of those. Let me be a damn shopkeeper with a girlfriend, damn it.
What I liked about ME1 was the character work and the worldbuilding, which I think was pretty good. People praise ME2's character work, but my problem is I think they stretched themselves out too much, and had too many characters to focus on the important ones. I also agree the characters of Miranda and Jack were bad. The only acceptable female romance options in Mass Effect are Liara, Tali -- and I'll go to bat for this one -- Ashley "religious tomboy" Williams. I hear the chicks really dig Garrus. And I mean really dig Garrus.
There is insufficient storytelling about male characters having compelling romantic relationships with women in all mediums. I dare everyone to try to find actually-sensitive storytelling about male-female relationships, from a male perspective, that isn't 1. pornography 2. completely hamfisted or 3. downplayed. Apparently there's "not a market for it" and "why do you love women that much, that's gay" but, uh, this is my thing, my question with each and every story I engage with is "how high quality is the love interest subplot."
The stuff I get is generally not great, but I have to take the crumbs I can get from the master's table. The best stuff might literally be fanfiction. Somehow teenagers on the internet are doing a better job with a whole genre than the entire media apparatus.
Eh. I don't intend to challenge your feelings / say that your enjoyment was in any way wrong, but I feel ME1's writing was in many respects emblematic of the problems the trilogy had a hole, which is to say a clear lack of planning.
In RPGs like Mass Effect, the 'critical path' refers to the series of must-make choices that the player cannot avoid. Sidequest choices may never be seen if you don't take a side quest, but you can't complete the main story and reach the sequel without the critical path. And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
And there was no plan- as seen in how ME2 picked up these choices- for what would follow if you actually killed someone (in several contexts, literally no content vis-a-vis a cameo of the surviving person), even as at the same time anyone who could be killed could no longer be relevant to the plot. As soon as you had the option to kill Wrex, every story arc Wrex could touch if he survived had to be carried forward if he was dead (because game development resources are limited if you weren't the Witcher 2 of the era), and this applied to everyone and everything. Later ME started to learn that not all choices needed to kill people off to suggest a difference- ME Andromeda actually had a good dynamic for its planets, like what sort of hive and scum and villainy would be the criminal underworld's dominant player- but from the start, ME1 didn't know how to build a choice structure to provide meaningful content contrasts. Especially with a penchant for choices too big to mutually co-exist as narrative drivers: the hyper-expansive rachni could only matter as much as they could exist in a narrative where they didn't exist at all, while the saved Council and the all-Human council could only lead to the same general location. No understanding that bigger choices aren't better.
Nor did it really understand how to do an ideology-morality system. Paragon was internally consistent in ME1- just defer to the Council when it's not literally the end of galactic civilization- but Renegade was just a mess. It couldn't decide whether it was human-first, Council-skeptic, xenophobic, utilitarian, sociopathic, or if it could tell a difference between them all. ME2 got even worse, as it would have the same argument positions flip sides of the morality wheel in the same conversation, but ME1 was the one to get to define a morality curve, and it couldn't.
I do agree that the writing strictly went downhill immediately after- the second game spent about a third of the trilogy introducing or reintroducing a character cast who could be dead by the end of it (thus guaranteeing they couldn't be plot-carrying characters for a game that didn't move forward the meta-plot)- and the ending of the trilogy is practically a case study for why you need to know how your story will end from the start so that you can work towards it.
Black sheep opinion as it is, but from a writing perspective my favorite games of the series were not quite ME3- which aside from the ending was actually quite solid as an apocalypse story- but actually Andromeda. While I fully accept and respect people who didn't like Andromeda's choice of tone for being campy, and the mechanical issues in presentation were real, the writing was trying to be both a deliberate sort of campy and a 'new introduction' spiritual reboot, and I honestly thought it worked better at that than ME1 did. There was enough deviations so that it was a spiritual reboot rather than a clone, even as it wrote itself out of the corner that the ME trilogy painted itself into with choices too big to ever properly reflect. Andromeda was much more judicious with its choices, leaning more on emotional relevance than 'massive geopolitical differences'- the sort of thing like which person is the hero-figure to a nation, rather than whether the nation would die or not- and these were things that were much better set up for being reflected in a sequel than the ME trilogy did. As far as writing for a trilogy, it was much better founded.
But, alas, it seems the next one will be in the Milky Way.
I can't stand Sanderson's work, for, well a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that he has really bought into the idea that culture is arbitrary and I am really bought into the idea that culture is contingent and so whenever he brings up some arbitrary cultural practice it brutally murders any interest I might have had in the setting. I can very easily imagine people who do not care about this at all, and hate Sanderson for totally different reasons.
Talking about writing being good or bad is really weird because people want and enjoy different things, and people are sucked out of a story for different reasons. You seem to be very fixated on the extent to which the story was well planned to function as a trilogy, where as that rates pretty low on the totem pole for me. I assume this is why you do not actually talk about the companions or world-building, when those are the two things @urquan brought up specifically as being their favorite parts (I agree with them). If I had to pick between a story that had perfect planning to create an overarching narrative structure for a trilogy, or a book with good characters, it is not even close. They are not even playing the same game. I would burn the narrative structure book just to read the good characters book for the handful of minutes that the fire burned.
Moving on,
Mass Effect is a military sci-fi story about a judge dread spy, hunting down a rogue judge dread spy. I feel like within that milieu it is not necessarily an indication of bad writing if the most pivotal scenes are situations where the main character has to make life and death choices. I actually don't really see what ideals of good writing this is supposed to be violating even outside of the military sci-fi genre.
You are obviously correct that there was no plan(or at least not a good one), and that between poor planning, clumsy execution, and format related limitations, the overarching narrative structure as a whole is not good. However I think you go too far when you say this is all locked in by ME1. Kaiden or Ashley die, and it sticks with that. They absolutely could have de-emphasized Wrex's importance to the wider galaxy while simply keeping him as a companion, or not, this would not have been difficult. They could have totally cut the side mission with the Rachni if you killed the queen in ME1. The whole mission is a complete stand alone that takes like 30 minutes. The reasons the Mass Effect trilogy is so disappointing (at least for me) is that it could have easily been better.
Paragon and Renegade get way too much hate. My Tav is 99% head cannon, because even though I have seven responses to every question there is no consistent characterization to any of them. Sometimes I can joke, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can be a hero paladin, sometimes I am a craven coward shuddering in fear (thanks cutscene). It turns out something like 75%+ of people just want to play some variation of Paragon, in literally every single-player RPG, lean into that and you can make better stories.
I agree on ME3, I like it and I think it gets too much hate because of the ending.
I feel like Andromeda has pretty glaring writing problems, the story constantly strains credulity because the world-building totally fails to support the narrative they wanted to tell. A quick breakdown.
There is no reason for you to be operating as a small team. There is no reason for you to ever even step foot on a planet outside of the Ancient Vaults, because your ability to manipulate vault technology is the only thing that is actually special about you. If you do step foot on a planet, there is no reason for you to do so without a shuttle to ferry you from place to place. There is no reason for 2/5ths of a 500,000 person colony mission where 80% of the population is still in cryo-sleep to terraform multiple planets, when they could and should be focusing their efforts on one for at least the next hundred years. The whole setup is horrible for a first person shooter single-player RPG. The vault tech stuff should all be long term research projects. Clearing out the Kett and securing objectives should all be large squad military actions. Honestly, the world-building and setup for Andromeda is wildly more compatible with a base builder game, you could make a reasonable Andromeda mod for Rim world and it might actually be good.
Culture is both arbitrary and contingent. It seeks plateaus of local minima. Which plateau you happen to be on is historically contingent, but can be otherwise arbitrary relative to other disconnected plateaus. And where exactly you sit in the plateau is arbitrary. The rest is contingent.
I can't speak for Sanderson's work though. I take it he builds cultures with significantly less environmentally contingent structures than you find realistic.
I don't understand most of your comment, I am not a Less Wrong reader.
To try to explain what I said, imagine a person who says that men wearing pants is 'arbitrary'. I think that person is trying to communicate that men wearing pants is random, without underlying reason or cause. I think that person is wrong.
So, I wouldn't go with "Men wearing pants" as an explanatory example, I would go with something more absolutely limiting, such as the state of the art of our food crops.
Corn is a great crop at least partially because we chose to spend thousands of generations selectively breeding. There was an original reason why corn was chosen over other available crops at the time- that's the historical contingency, and then there's the modern fact that corn is a better crop than other similar plants that we never modified. But- Some of those plants might be able to produce better outcomes- might have produced better outcomes- had we known about them and chosen them all those epochs ago when we chose corn.
Our Plateau here is the different species of corn. They are different, but many are all relatively similar. You can take your pick of corn based dishes, choose different species of corn to make different varieties of those dishes, and you can selectively breed our current corn to get other, slightly different varieties of corn. We are in a sense, married to these historical choices now. Not to a single point, a single species of corn, but to the general area of the state of the art of corn that we currently occupy. A 'plateau' of viability.
But purely hypothetically, there may well be a viable food crop 100k generations down the line of, say, parsely. If we run into a civilization that bred parsely into a different supercrop, that would be a different plateau. But to get to the world where we are using that supercrop from this world, would be a 100k generation ordeal. Similarly, to those in that world, it would be an ordeal to produce our supercorn.
So this is the sense in which the plateau is arbitrary. There are other hypothetical stable ways of life out there. But we are stuck on a metaphorical island. Cultural Nomadism could get us to these 'islands' of culture, but the journey may be hard and costly and uncertain, and in many cases is inordinately expensive.
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I don't have anything approaching a retort, just a smile and appreciation.
Yes, I do value the trilogy structure and design more than the worldbuilding (in part because worldbuilding is easy to find, but good series are hard). I find that good story structure is indicative of good writing more than a good character dynamic, but that's because I've seen far too many movies or shows with an interesting premise fall apart for lack of planning after winging it. Good character writing can exist regardless, but good narrative design will elevate. (I will stand by that Mordin's Tuchanka arc was one of the best moments of the series, as it was simultaneously against part of his theme in ME2 but also a natural progression of his obvious guilt, and a natural integration into how to recruit allies into the war.)
I also agree that ME2 could have absolutely evaded the pitfalls ME1 set up for lack of planning. I personally view them as one and the same and that the onus is on ME1 to write for the sake of the sequel if it was designed as a trilogy to start, but the nature of that is that nothing required tethering the sequels to a trilogy character arc. Rather, a personal favorite proposal I once read was one that every ME game in the trilogy have a separate focus character: Commander Shepard in ME1 as the 'public face' of Humanity for what it does as a galactic hero, but then PC!Jacob Taylor could have been the ME2 player character for a 'what Humanity is in the dark' thematic contrast, while not!Vega in ME3 could have been the Rising War Hero for the Reaper War. Each player character an independent character with reflections observing differences rather than 'hey, remember me Shepard?!' cameos, and in each game the previous player character is their own character characterized by the key decisions of the previous game.
I don't disagree with your criticisms of Andromeda on a lore-technical level, but I just smile and wave vaguely to the deliberately campiness of what was, at heart, a sort of first contact story. When comedy is a deliberate goal, I can overlook a lot of functional-efficiency things, and I suppose I just accept that as part of the buy-in.
(If I wanted to pick at realism, the role of Spectre as a shooting-game protagonist also doesn't make sense as presented in the trilogy. Council Space doesn't need it when legal violence is so readily available, and non-Council space doesn't respect it. Spectre status Soldiers wouldn't be useful in a setting where legally-sanctioned blackops are everywhere and legal violence is so common- the real benefitors of Spectre status would be a Volus tax-accountant who can use the status to cut through bureaucratic red tape to unroot financial crimes threatening the galactic economy, and using that Spectre status to keep a band of mercenaries as his muscle.)
(Give me biotic god pencile pusher, doom of tax evaders and counterfeit e-zero smugglers!)
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Yes, I had a longer response at first that included how much I enjoy TNG (the bridge crew) and how the Mass Effect crew of fun competent people who work together for a common goal is a refreshing and pleasant experience compared to everything else being 'serious' story telling, which just means everyone has to talk constantly about their trauma and hate each other, while being sarcastic and ironic.
I am somewhat suspect of complaints about 'quality' with writing, just across the board, but also specifically when talking about 'romance' from the male perspective. I think it is mostly an isolated demand type phenomenon. Pull up straight male dating sims and visual novels(tons of games where you are a normal guy trying to get a girlfriend), and most people will say the whole genre falls within the porn to ham-fisted range, but if you look at popular LGBT visual novels and dating sims the writing is basically indistinguishable(and nobody complains). I think that feminists have been very effective at spreading memes about the Problematic Male Fantasy in a very asymmetrical way such that straight male wish-fulfillment is the only kind of fantasy that is quickly and easily recognized as bad. I even think there is a real extent to which some men have been conditioned into finding their own innate preferences icky, or at the very least I know of one case where this is true (myself).
I am not sure exactly what kind of story you are looking for, a male version of Colleen Hoover, Your Lie in April, When Harry Met Sally (the video game)? I am also not sure what 'sensitive storytelling' means. My previously mentioned skepticism around a lot of 'literary critique' is because I think the human impulse to describe personal subjective preference as an objective and legible standard is way too strong(obviously I am not guilty of it though).
"If it's queer, you're in the clear" isn't recognized as much as it should be.
People mock them for being simultaneously incredibly prudish and repressed while engaging in performatively extreme sexual depravity, but it's actually an effective recruiting tactic.
It's the same thing as "nobody is allowed outside except to join a leftist riot." Repress natural desires and redirect their expression through party-controlled spaces and systems.
"No fucking outside the state, all fucking within the state, no fucking against the state"
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Do you have recommendations for ME fic? I feel like it doesn’t get that much, considering its popularity.
And I’m sure I can find mainstream het romance from a male perspective! It has to exist! Has to!
Sapkowski: too cringe. Rothfuss:
sametoo fantastical. Banks: too inhuman, even those who are Culture-standard. Mieville and Bakker: too fucked up. Cook: whatever Croaker and the Lady have going on, it sure ain’t wholesome. Sanderson: don’t get me started.deep breath
Yeah, I’m coming up blank, and I’m ashamed of it. I’m sure it’s out there, and I’ll check my shelves when I get home, but this is pathetic. So I’ll take any recs you’ve got.
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ME1 is the peak of that series, it's all downhill after that one (both in story and gameplay). It's a real shame. Years ago, I saw some comment online which said "I would love to play the trilogy suggested by that first game", and I agree wholeheartedly.
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Not like it's hard to see why. In all seriousness, you very much do get the "he's dangerous, take-charge, but kind of awkward, hurt a bit, and I can fix him" thing going on, which among the kinds of women masculine enough to bother with Mass Effect (and body pillows) is how their attraction works (though, of course, that kind of woman is rare to begin with).
I just watch anime for this; Tonikawa: Over the Moon and I can't understand what my husband is saying are good for that. Maybe "actually they love each other and nothing that cancerous happens" counts as pornography, though.
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That's an interesting perspective. The only circumstance I can remember in this game isJack, but if you do that immediately in the early game after you recruit her it actually locks you out of the more interesting parts of her romance arc- and you... actually don't fuck in that one if you take it to its conclusion, if I recall correctly . (And I don't think Morinth counts, because if you do that, obvious consequence is obvious; though I do admit that mimicing her mom plot point came out of nowhere if you side with her during that quest... which you have literally no reason to do other than to meme. Which is also probably why "we'll bang, OK" with her exists in the first place.)
Personally, I would have preferred to bone Legion, but you... kind of do that anyway, in a way. The Garrus romance is about as close as you can actually get for that one and he's not the same.
The Jack romance certainly ends with a lovers relationship, and her romance is the only one where she makes meaningful emotional healing and interpersonal progression in ME2. Miranda is uniquely characterized as smiling in a way she never did before and is also only able to have a healthy emotional relationship solely if Shepard is the one to provide it (with their dick). Kelly Chambers, in so much as that one qualifies, resolves it's emotional catharsis by having her do stripper dances in your room after she was kidnapped, locked into a pod, and nearly turned into bio-goop. Tali is much less emotionally traumatized, but certainly emotionally questionable given that she risks death itself for the sake of the Shepard bone out of a mix of captain-crushing hero crush (and the fact that you covered up her father's cultural war crimes).
Ashley... is a more mature frank attraction in ME1, but Ashely's character arc also jumps to the point that the tomboy not-a-model gets a major model glow up come ME3, so who knows there.
The boning is a player reward for cashing out an emotional investment, not the conclusion of a plotted story point. I blame immersiveness, specifically the transposition of the player into the third person avatar, as the root cause of most narrative weakness in the highly variable and interactive videogame medium. The necessity of respecting player agency disincentivizes railroading, while keeping plots coherent requires branching paths. 'Play the game your way' necessarily means that the player has a strong chance to blow up a really compelling plotline with major consequences. Killing Caesar in Fallout New Vegas should be an immensely consequential decision, but it makes 0 difference beyond some vague dialogue changes at the end of the game. The very nature of videogames as an interactive medium means developers are forced into 'respecting' player agency even if agency results in shitty stories and shitty action. (for example Bioshock is famously railroaded and ends up having only a single narrative path snd is all the better for it, and we have already expounded on the failures of DAI and ME elsewhere in this thread)
In the end though, I do think that most videogame writers were also given a really free reign to write whatever the hell they wanted because most people didn't bother with narration. I could play marathon or doom or jazz jackrabbit or wolfenstein with only twitch reflexes activated and skip through all the cutscenes, since my dopamine hit comes from blowing up the obvious bad guys. In a narrative focused game, the dopamine hit is the denouement of the characters invested struggle, and that just brings the weaknesses of writing to the fore.
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Ah yes,
ReapersMiranda. Putting the ass in Mass Effect since 2010.Honestly I'm not too much in knots about Tali since ME2 isn't even the first game she's in. Same thing with Liara, but maybe she doesn't count since you can't romance her in ME2 (not that you can do that with Ashley either, of course). I think the least fleshed-out/one that makes the least sense is Samara, discounting the alternative option.
I do find that the male options in ME2 were better but that's just because I think Garrus and Thane are better characters (not that Jack isn't a good character herself). Too bad they memed on Jacob in ME3; they didn't really flesh his character out at all in ME2 (maybe ME1 players blew up Carth more often so they didn't think it was worth the effort, lol).
Doesn't that option become available to you before she gets kidnapped? I do agree it would be more interesting if that option was locked out after that because of that, but I'm not sure they thought about it that hard.
You could maybe make the case for the current crop of female 3d modelling, but storytelling? Miranda, as well as all the other ladies of Mass Effect, were all properly fleshed out characters, with their stories, struggles, charms and flaws. You could put them all in a niqab, and they'd still be interesting characters (as proven by Tali). The current crop of female characters are all cardboard cut-outs. Miranda's ass tipping the domino that launched a chain reaction leding to the collapse of the skyscraper of game writing, makes absolutely no sense.
I know we disagree off and on, but may I commend you for making me laugh out loud at this visualization? The scaling alone...
I do appreciate the disagreements, for what it's worth. You argue straight and clearly, and even if I remain stubborn, it tends to be the kind of disagreement that triggers some introspection.
And in any case laughing at my jokes will always trump disagreement.
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I wish you had elaborated on which games you have in mind that exemplify bad modern game writing. And specifically how their writing is lacking. You talk about theories for why it happened - but what happened exactly? Please give examples.
Some of my examples are in this comment.
I guess my problem with these examples would be, I never looked at any of these as paragons of game writing, even in their heyday. In my youth, Halo was a multiplayer game, people didn't care about the campaign. I've never heard Destiny praised particularly for its writing, I associate it with multiplayer as well. Call of Duty is the Marvel movie of videogames, they've had stories but I've also mostly associated them with multiplayer rather than their campaigns. I don't do horror in any medium, so I can't speak to Dead Space.
But overall, your list leaves me wondering whether you're just looking for good stories in all the wrong places.
I have to completely disagree with the assertion that Halo was viewed as purely a multiplayer game - for myself and many, many others it was viewed as a story game first and foremost, with multiplayer as a (very welcome) secondary feature. I'd also say your coloring of Call of Duty, especially 4, being primarily a multiplayer game, is completely false. Call of Duty was essentially only known for being a single player game until after Call of Duty 4, which was a surprise hit. Destiny was supposed to be a negative example of story (minus the text-based entries). Dead Space is an example that I had to bring up because its story was decently (DS1) to very well (DS2) regarded, and it's an indicator of how much it fell that a modern, well-made Dead Space game fell so far short of these.
As a preemptive response to discussions on multiplayer in games, I will concede the multiplayer is going to have longer legs but that's because you're always going to get much more playtime out of multiplayer than out of single player. I don't want the discussion to devolve into talking about "which people played more", because in any game with a functional multiplayer it's very likely its overall playtime is higher than the campaign's. But that should not be an indicator of the importance of a campaign. It's also pretty biased toward what we know of the series now, given than both Call of Duty and Halo started out as pretty much exclusively single player affairs. They became popular on that merit first and foremost long before Xbox Live or matchmaking even existed.
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Some previous discussion on the matter. And some more.
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Deus Ex released in May 2000 with memorable writing, interesting choices, and a deliriously complicated setting. Between the cool factor and the memes, it’s remained relevant for decades.
Daikatana also released in May 2000, featuring…none of these things. It’s best known today for its questionable marketing.
I don’t take this as evidence of a trend in game writing or production. Our impressions are formed by outliers rather than the mean or median or even modal game for a year. We still get vivid, cohesive experiences from developers with a vision. Have you played Disco Elysium yet?
Good points. I think we need to differentiate between two groups:
The kind of mature industry that can churn out one Total War game per year, and a Modern Warfare every two years, and two Superhero games per year, and another Hero Shooter or Current-Thing-Clone so often they all just blend together...didn't exist in 2000. And didn't reach or cater to the same size and type of audience. Very very obviously the writing of the second group will be of a completely different nature than that of the first.
Both Sierra Entertainment and Lucasarts Games produced new games more or less yearly in the late 80s and early 90s. The difference is that many are considered all time classics and often feature on best of all time lists.
Eg. Lucasarts made Maniac Mansion (1987), Zac McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Loom (1990), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Monkey Island 2 (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (1994) and that list is leaving out a lot of other games from them.
Fair point, but I would maintain that there is still a significant difference in reach and intended audience between the big-name game companies of the 90s and those of the 2020s.
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Realistically, how am I to extract any sort of statistical average from the games released in a single year? The amount of games released is staggering, and even if I played them full-time I could not hit all of them - and if you're getting genuinely mathematical, you'd have to include all of them.
I could play all the AAA titles. Maybe all the AA titles, too (even though that's a shrinking category of games - something I'll get into another time). But once you drop to studios of 10 or fewer people, the amount of games published each year numbers in the thousands. As I mentioned with music, the signal to noise ratio is just huge (which also precludes me simply taking a random sample and then extrapolating - because at this point the amount of shovelware games is, once again, staggering). To your question, I have never even heard of Disco Elysium before reading your message. That's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. I'm not as avid a gamer now that I'm older, but I still do play games from time to time, so it's not like I haven't heard of any new games.
And even then, how am I to give something that can quantitatively measure their quality in a way that I can compare it? I can only give my opinions on games that I have played, and see how the newer ones compare to the old ones.
As I noted in my original post, I posited a modified thesis, that it's "seemingly impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories". Such a thesis, as I said, is theoretically something I could explore, if I were retired and had endless funds. Neither is true, so I can only cherry pick the games which have caught my eye in one way or another. To compare apples to apples:
Halo is a series that is widely regarded to have fallen completely apart with every installment after Bungie stopped working on it, or even before (Reach sucks, sorry). The original Halo games had serviceable at worst and damn interesting at best stories, which were elevated by slick gameplay and unique music and sound design.* Whereas the following games (4, 5, and Infinite) all had serious narrative problems. These, of course, come after Halo had been elevated to a legendary status, and Microsoft could easily afford to hire damn near anyone they wanted. Of these, 4 is actually my favorite, because it at least has a personal attachment to the lead writer. It unfortunately still lands flat. Infinite had Joe Staten (Halo's original lead writer) attached, but had so much chaff that apart from one or two very good cutscenes it was even less compelling. 5 is universally considered awful.
Destiny is actually an interesting example to me, because it's an example of what I mentioned earlier: that text-based writing seems to be easier to execute on than voiced dialogue or cutscenes. That or the people used for both were separate (which is true in this case; the Books of Sorrow from Destiny's Taken King expansion are widely considered some of the story's best, and it's never put in game, and funnily enough, the people who wrote it were let go shortly after). Moreover, I found every time a character from the Grimoire (the written story) was realized in game, I simply hated them. They were awful with marvel-like lines and no reference to the interesting ideas raised in some of their written dialogue. Note that this also got worse as the series went on. It went from having a barebones story that I could forgive (because I could fill it in with the written lore) to one that was constantly undermining its own tension and breaking the tone with awful jokes.
Call of Duty isn't even on a bell curve with its quality - it's more like a sine wave. The first three games are just direct ripoffs of famous WWII properties like Band of Brothers and Enemy at the Gates. Then you get to Call of Duty 4 and you suddenly have a game that feels like a 90s war thriller, tying two separate plotlines together cohesively and effectively. Then you have the two sequels, which make no sense at all but are still kind of fun. Then you get to something like Call of Duty Vanguard, ham-fistedly inserting very modern political perspectives into World War II. I'll honestly write this off because it's so inconsistent, but in my eyes the series peaked long ago.
Dead Space may actually be the best example. It's the newest IP that had quality (Destiny was essentially never good). The first two games are excellent to me, giving compelling explorations of the worlds they're set in and the people that inhabit them. The third I skipped due to its universally negative response, and I feel justified having watched some clips of the story online. Then you get to Dead Space: Remake. A game I could write a whole post on, because it is so fascinating in that the people who made it very obviously love and care for making a Dead Space game. This stands in contrast with Halo, where 343 Industries was very vocal about wanting to change and make their own mark on the series. For Dead Space, they executed just about perfectly in its atmosphere, art, and gameplay, but genuinely could not write the characters. The voice acting is bad; the lines are needlessly made worse; the characterizations are butchered; several people have their races swapped or are made openly bisexual (note that having gay or bisexual characters isn't a problem to me, but they rewrote established characters lamenting old boyfriends coming back to life - a strangely hypersexual comment given that this crew was only established for this mission and had only been there for a few weeks). These people were creative and to my eyes had to subversive agenda. I genuinely think they saw it as a more natural story to have everyone look like southern Californian hip creatives. That aside, someone like Isaac Clarke is just written completely differently from how he was in the other games. EA put a lot of work into this game, and yet the story was consistently weaker, even though it was supposed to be exactly the same as the original game but expanded.
These are my off the cuff examples of games that I have played. A couple videos that make similar points to what I've talked about today, that may illustrate some of my qualms, are the one on millennial writing (https://youtube.com/watch?v=FyHG8EfcA5c) and one breaking down some specifically bad examples of newer Destiny (https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKYlL6ZGvBQ). This definitely doesn't encompass all of my thoughts on this, but most of it is also in the OP and other responses. I could get into more but this comment is long enough and it would require extensive editing, so I'll leave it at that.
*Note that I do consider how I "feel" about a game to be a complement or detriment to its writing. I'm a proponent of the sentiment that plenty of plots have holes - it's only once you're so disengaged that you notice them that it becomes a problem. I will use an art game like Limbo as an extreme example. The story of that game is essentially incomprehensible and almost inconsequential apart from the fact that it is a backdrop for the imagery and atmosphere it conjures. To dial it back, a simply serviceable story presented well (which I consider something like Halo 1 to be) is more than palatable to me, though I will always applaud depth if it works.
That's the "modern audiences" bit from one of the Rings of Power producers which I can't now find but did stumble across another article which raised my blood pressure; I'm not impressed by multiple Hugo winner N.K. Jemisin's work in the first place ('the Origenes are allegory for Strong Black Women who get feared and hated by Black men and of course racist whites which is all whites' 'okay but these people literally have the power to destroy the world' 'you racist! that's why you don't like them!'), but this takes the cake - Nora, Tolkien was not writing about you back when he was inventing his own personal mythology inspired by the Warwickshire countryside pre-First World War, so put away your performative indignation about how very dare he not be 21st century Californian liberal and go find something else to be professionally aggrieved over while you wait for the plaudits of how wunnerfully talented and amaaaazing you are to be cast at your feet yet again:
EDIT EDIT: In fact, Nora, if any ethnic group has a right to get riled up by the depiction of Orcs, it's - Mongolians. Not Black middle-class college educated professional women:
From the Selected Letters:
Erik Kain has a good go at this notion of "updated for modern audiences".
EDIT: Is Nora a little bit racist herself? Or is it that "you can't be racist about white people"? Because this privileged Black woman is carrying on as though she's a poor black single mother living in poverty in the Deepest Deep South, while her entire life has been one of middle and upper-middle class achievement and garlanding with laurels:
Oh, that poor woman, struggling unrecognised to break into the Old White Male SF Writers cosy club!
As to that novel The City We Became, well of course you can't be racist about white people. All the lead characters are BIPOC and/or queer, while the bad one is - naturally - a white woman:
I see Nora managed to include a Lenape character, even though they pretty much don't live in New York anymore. Ah well, I guess this is what makes it fantasy.
Ah, yes: the racist, neo-Nazi, drunken, violent, abusive Irish. I love you too, Nora. But the name is not "Aislyn" (any bets she pronounces it "Ace-linn"?) but Aisling (Ash-ling) and it doesn't mean "dream" as such, which would be "bringlóid" (shout out to ST:TNG for using it!), it means more "vision" and is in fact an entire genre of allegorical poetry, sometimes set to music and sung. Hey, are you culturally appropriating my heritage there, Nora? Tut-tut! Naughty! If you're not that culture you are not supposed to use it!
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I think Modern Warfare 2’s story is somewhat underrated. It’s objectively ridiculous in the broad scope: It reads like a nightmare Tom Clancy would have when he was in bed with a high fever. But it totally nails the queasy off-balance feeling that spiraling geopolitical crises in the 21st century would have, which makes it feel prescient. It also manages to (perhaps unintentionally) smuggle in some interesting commentary about 9/11 and the subsequent US response.
Are you talking about the series as a whole or Call of Duty 4 (also known as "Modern Warfare 1, The First One from 2007 and not 2019, No I'm Not Playing The New One")? Because I felt Call of Duty 4 was mostly "realistic" in that I could see
Obviously not all of it is realistic, but the broad strokes feel pretty plausible. Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 has James Bond level contrivances and Red Dawn-esque fantasies of Russian military prowess.
I’m talking specifically about MW2 (2009). Modern Warfare 1 was reasonably realistic.
Then definitely agreed. I lump the Black Ops series in with post CoD4 Modern Warfare. Very fun games, completely nonsensical if you apply even the most basic thought to them. And it's sort of indicative of my larger point - the second these games got big and intricate it seemed almost impossible to put a compelling, interesting, logically consistent story in them. Only the lightning in a bottle original game managed to do so, even though MW2 was made by the exact same people (up until the original studio leads quit, which was after its release).
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I loved DE for the most part, but maybe I'm alone on this, but I felt it didn't quite stick the landing. In the early and mid parts of playing the game I was sure I would replay it in the future, at least once. I ended up not doing that because the ending deflated my enthusiasm.I got a "good" one after taking care of my character throughout. It kinda took away the mystique of the whole thing though, ending up pretty much "just-so". It was okay, not unbelievable. But I wanted something more than social realism. A lone, bitter old man who wanted to kill someone who got a woman he couldn't get, or something, partly due to being on the losing side of things as a communist. And some cryptid creature. What was the point of the journey? Harry ending up, for me, as slightly less of a wreck compared to the start. Cool, I guess... I would have wanted to hear more about the whole thing about the world being swallowed up by the Pale or whatever.
I’m aiming to finish the game this weekend, so I won’t get to your spoilers yet. I got up toconfronting her before dying to a heart attack and shelving the game for a bit, and next thing I know, there’s been several patches.
It’s been on my mind recently after reading Sacred and Terrible Air, which…wow, that’s a book for a certain kind of Mottizen.
Good thing I used spoiler tags then. :D Have fun!
Has that book been released in English? Do you recommend it? What kind of Mottizen?
I appreciated the tags.
There are two English translations. I read this one, which was completely a volunteer effort. The other one was commissioned by fans; I’m not sure how the two differ.
It’s brilliantly written. If you enjoyed the prose stylings, the setting, the grotesque cast of DE, you will find more of that. Naturally, it’s also hilarious in that understated way.
There’s also excellent thematic cohesion. I hesitate to call it “commentary,” but…there’s a setting, and a plot, and these characters, and they all come together in service of a very specific feeling, sensation, zeitgeist.
Perhaps you can see what kind of Mottizen I meant. The people who catch a glimpse of this feeling, but don’t just latch on to it unexamined. The ones who want to really interrogate their longing. I can’t stress enough how rare it is, the way SaTA engages with this.
There’s so much more I want to say, though I need to finish DE before I risk further commentary. Suffice to say I found the book very, very technically impressive.
But there’s a catch.
My understanding is that one or two sequels were intended. With the collapse of ZAUM, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get them. And SaTA cries out for just a bit more. It comes to a halt at a bizarre point in both plot and setting. Not rushed, but abrupt. I would describe it as two-thirds of an amazing book.
Depending on which parts of this review line up with your experience of DE, you may find SaTA fascinating or disappointing. Either way, there will probably be some frustration. I feel that, but I don’t regret reading it at all.
I'm still not entirely clear what went on there, but wow. Talk about getting what you wished for and the need to be careful when wishing. One taste of success, and suddenly all the comradeship goes out the window. A shame, I would love a sequel. Hard to know what the story would be, but there's enough of the world and its history that you could set it in a different part of the world, new characters, and still have a fascinating game.
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Is it worse? The trouble with these conversations is that it almost inevitably involves cherry picking examples in an entirely non-rigorous way. I haven't played Marathon, so I'll take your word for it that it's well-written, but it came out in 1994. Wikipedia's list of "notable releases" in 1994 includes Marathon, but also includes games like TIE Fighter, Tekken, Doom II, and Earthworm Jim. These are not bad games (in fact, they are by reputation pretty good), but they are not exactly known for their brilliant writing. Back in the early days of video games, it was extremely common for games to have almost vestigial plots. As I understand it, this was the product of a mixture of indifference and technical limitations (story took up space, which was at a premium).
Undoubtedly there are more games with bad or mediocre writing, but that's mostly because there are more video games and they're more likely to attempt a story. I can cherry pick recent games with good writing as well (e.g. BG3, CP2077), but that doesn't really prove anything.
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Two things.
It's not just video game writing. Writing across the board has utterly fallen apart. Characters lack any sort or purpose or core motivation, and mostly just get shuffled to the next artificial point of conflict/drama. Plots make almost no sense, even on their own terms, with characters acting in wildly unbelievable ways to force it along. Or the plot just regularly breaks the rules or themes of the work because it doesn't know what else to do. And that's not even touching on the fact that literally the only themes worked into anything these days is weird demoralization propaganda focused entirely on privilege/oppression dynamics, often in strictly black and white moralistic terms. Zero awareness of the human condition.
In so far as video game writing was "good", it was good in the sense that it was load bearing. The dialog could be awkward, the prose could be stilted, but if it supported the world that was being built and created the illusion that the game was a more lived in, real place than was possible to actually create or depict given technical, financial or design constraints, people generally say it was "good". I rarely find this to be the case anymore, as weird current year political bullshit immediately collapses the writing under the load a fictional world places upon it.
I do sometimes try to entertain the arguments of people who claim nothing has changed. That video games always had out of place "current year" pop culture references. Or that they were already political. And I know examples abound. I recall reading about one particular Infocom game that was written out of pure spite for Reagan winning a second term.
All the same, what felt like rare exceptions has become the norm, to the point where it crowds everything else out. It hasn't quite reached the level in games that it has on Netflix, where probably half the dialog is weird current year political references and marxist bullshit, and 3/4 of the characters are nonsensically and almost impossibly diverse for the setting. Which is to say, sometimes you encounter a purely ludic game with almost no writing what so ever. But among any game I've seen that has any appreciable amount of writing to speak of, if it's western, or even if activist got ahead of the translating duties, it's all sorts of shit up with current year nonsense.
Great game writing is often inseparable from great worldbuilding. If you look at something like Roadwarden, a simple RenPy illustrated text RPG, the game is its writing. It lives and dies on the strength of its worldbuilding so it has to pull that off, or else fail completely.
When the writing is bad though, I find it's less a failure of worldbuilding, or even current year bullshit, but more because of what must be intentional blandness. You don't get Starfield NPCs without trying to be that boring.
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I think this expands on the cultural issue that I mentioned. I think there is some severe form of cultural myopia, with an additional dash of political activism that is all-but-mandatory in large creative industries, that has made writing fall apart. I will admit to avoiding talking about the political angle, due to the fact that I find it so emotionally charged that it's hard for me to actually detail what specifically is the problem without feeling like I'm just inserting comments to justify my own beliefs. That said, it is very real. One of the writers I brought up in my post had started violently talking about those critical of COVID measures. He fell in line with the specific blue tribe bias that's in the video game industry despite the fact that he'd been out of it for over 20 years at that point. This indicates that it goes beyond simply "the industry".
I've often lamented that the internet has made everyone sound the same, everywhere. The same references, patterns of speech, opinions - it feels like a Dead Internet even if I know for a fact I'm interacting with real people. Sometimes I'm interacting with people in real life and hear exact patterns of speech I've seen on left-leaning reddit communities.
My point in bringing that up is that seeing this writer whom I really respect fall into such a thought-terminating cliche (I believe he said "Just get the fucking vax") made me wonder how many potentially brilliant writers are out there right now, unknowingly stunted by the political climate and their obedience to it. Given someone who predated the time of mandatory political views for creative work failed to avoid that pitfall, how could someone raised in it fare better? How many various ways of thinking have been culled and brought into line by the mandatory participation in the culture war modern society has cultivated? And how many completely untalented writers have been propelled into prominence by adherence to the "correct" politics? The answer to both those questions is definitely over zero, and even at that level I think that's a disaster. I genuinely fear we're heading for a dark age creatively. My only hope is that it's looked back on as a very brief period of time.
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I think this may have something to do with most current developers coming to it as players. When the medium was newer developers were likelier to have other interests.
Creativity and quality art I think requires upstream culture to die on but if your upstream culture is just more of what you’re making then it becomes repetitive, derivative, and self-referential.
The creator of Zelda for instance famously based the game on exploring caves as a kid. If you spent your childhood playing games and wanting to make one you’re less likely to have interesting experiences to draw on I think external to gaming.
Nerd culture is sort of a dead end in this sense I think. It’s not rich enough for others to draw on and its participants tend to be focused exclusively on it, so it never really attains the quality of other storytelling media.
My two cents.
That was sort of my point bringing up the original writers of Marathon and my grandfather. The well they drew on for everything they did was vast. Those downstream of it have very little that they effectively draw on.
I think it's unfortunately gone beyond nerd culture. The internet, in bringing everything together, has made the whole world very much smaller, and the lifespan of unique aspects get ever shorter. I remember that when the internet was new(er), contemporary memes would call on references 30-40 years in the past (Khaaaaaaan!). Not only that, but they'd be in vogue for literal years. Now you're lucky if they call back on something 6 months old, and last even less than that. Imagine a We Are Number One meme today. It would be cringe-inducingly out of style. More than memes, media everywhere is only referential, and only to a certain point.
As you've said, it's all upstream to a very certain point. The water is stagnant.
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I think the opposite. I would guess that today, far fewer people working in videogame development are actually fans of videogames as opposed to, say, in the 90s. Certainly a lot of the suits probably aren't, and I would bet that the writing room probably has one of the lowest combined steam library volumes outside of the random consultant companies brought in to do various jobs.
I can't help but think it probably mirrors game journalism, where it seems like many of the people working in the field don't actually even like videogames and certainly aren't any good at them -- whereas back in the 90s I could definitely tell that most of the journos, certainly at the printed mags, were big gamers. And in turn, the devs were dedicated hobbyists who got into the field because they genuinely loved it.
Now, it's just a way to make money. Now, it's just a job, not a passion.
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There is a plethora of factors that is infecting all of media, resulting in subpar writing. I would push back a bit in that games like Red Dead 2, The last of us (at least part 1, maybe part 2), It Takes Two, Control/Alan Wake 2, Balders Gate, Cyberpunk etc. all have reasonably coherent and compelling storytelling from the last few years.
So part of your reasoning has to come from separating the wheat from the chaff. There's simply MORE video games being released with varying degrees of writing quality. Of course, many game don't worry much about the writing quality and are still successful (Balatro doesn't have a plot, for example), so writing doesn't determine if a game sells well as much as one might think. Market saturation really does make it more difficult. The barrier of entry of making a game and publishing a game has become much lower, so more people are making games on the off chance they make an insane return on investment.
But let's pretend to ignore that for a bit. I believe 'creative' commercial arts has a too many cooks problem. So many people want to put their mark on a game and implement their ideas into a game. The great works of the past had a few people working on a project - Shakespeare, Tokien, Stolzheneizhen, Wagner, Mozart, are all singular people who had maybe one or two additional contributors in the creation of their works. Video games have hundreds of people included in making a game which can create too much noise. This makes some sense as games are much larger and require a lot more additive details than the historic games you reference.
Another problem is voice acting in modern games force succinct writing - now that major games are all fully voiced, it caused a sudden change in how game characters are written. The biggest example for me was the difference between the characters in FF9 and then in FF10, where in 9, characters had to be unique through how they're written creating dynamic, nuanced and unique characters. FF10's characters weren't nearly as dramatic because of the difficulty of writing for recorded voice.
While blue tribe organizations like Sweet Baby probably has a negative effect on modern game writing, I think it's fairly minimal considering the volume and quantity of games produced.
The legacy of the tidus laugh forever stains all emotional moments in videogame cutscenes.
I really hate how people latched onto the Tidus laugh as "bad voice acting". The first time I played the game, it was clear that it was meant to be the character laughing in a forced, fake way. One can argue whether that's a good thing to have in a scene, but it isn't the VA's fault that he executed the script he was given.
The VA (James Arnold Taylor) has explicitly said it was intentional. FFX's real issue with the story (even though I love it) is that none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game, and even then you had to really be paying attention and piecing things together to make sense of it (and even then there are plot holes and nonsensical bits).
This is true of pretty much all Final Fantasy stories. Actually the FF series is an interesting case study for this topic, seeing as games have been consistently released for the past 30 years with many of the same people involved again and again.
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yeah, seriously! It's amazing how the entire internet latched onto that one scene, out of context, and completely misinterpreted it. The voice acting was fine. It was just a big change, getting used to having so much dialogue and all of it voiced.
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Scale both of the amount of games and of the games themselves is certainly a large part of it. What's specifically interesting to me is how the largest games can't seem to get it together, whereas before they were pretty good at it. Or rather, games now are so big there's no way a reasonable decision can be made about it. Halo has always been one of the biggest games with the biggest teams around. In 2007 that was around 110 full time Bungie employees, with no outsourcing. In 2021 that was around 450, and that's not counting the outsourced employees, which one source (read: a twitter post) said totaled about 1200. I'm assuming that's including random managerial staff, so let's go with the smaller number. That's still a fantastically large amount, and I imagine it's hard to steer a ship like that, even just on story.
I won't even get into the political angle, but I'm sure it's fun.
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