Something that we as gamers need to understand

[gavinmcinns]

Look, I like a good story as much as anyone does.

But, the main attraction of games is GAMEPLAY. I can't fucking stand games that totally destroyed their own gameplay simply to tell a story. Every day the same dream sucks. Doesn't matter how much fucking symbolism it has, it sucks.

I play games for GAMEPLAY. Would I like them to have a good story? That's a stupid question. Of course I would. But I don't want the gameplay watered down and hampered and torn to shit just because it wouldn't be as dramatic if the player had more freedom.

Edit: I just read more of the topic and if you'll now excuse me I need to go find the handle I just flew off of.

You need both for a compelling experience. There needs to be a reason for why you are doing things in the game, otherwise it becomes completely pointless (just as it does in life).

When you say you hate when games are overdramatic and hamper the gaming experience, those are NOT good stories. Good stories accentuate the experience and enhance the gameplay. A perfect example of what NOT TO do is Mass Effect 2. A pretty good example of what TO do is Mass Effect 1.

 

[Fappy]

My first questions before diving into this are these.

What do you consider "good" writing? And does whether something is "good" writing or not depend on if it's "mature" or not?

I'd have to say good writing constitutes writing that gets me emotionally involved in the story. Writing that makes me really care about the characters. As for the second question, I'm not quite sure what you mean by mature writing. If you mean Game Of Thrones in dealing with dark themes such as death, poverty and an unfair world, I'd have to say no. Pixar manages to have stories for kids that are well written, I've also heard that Psychonaughts and Driver San Fransisco are well written games with light themes. I never subscribed to the "True Art is Angsty" concept.

Glad to hear the latter.

As to the former though, the problem with that is that's a very subjective criteria. What one person finds emotionally involving might not be so for another person.

But following your criteria, I think we do in fact have good writing in games, they just tend to not occur much in the most popular games which are focused more on multiplayer than any real story. Even the Mario series, in spite of how simple the platformer games tend to be, has emotional moments from certain games in the series like Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, Super Paper Mario, and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. I think that there's actually a lot more games with good writing (When said games actually have a plot) than there are ones with bad writing, people just focus too much on the well known few that don't because the bad makes more news than the good.

Mario RPG is a brilliantly written game and by far and large the most well written Mario game ever (not hard to do, honestly). I mostly agree on what you're saying here. A lot of games have really great stories... it's just that a lot of the more popular ones don't. I've been on an RPG binge as of late primarily due to the fact that they tend to have much better stories than other genres.

 

[Evonisia]

Amnesia is a beautifully insane game, but it's a horror game they benefit from not having that much writing it's more about showing you without words to make your own interpretation, see Spec Ops: The Line. But Silent Hill 3 had good writing.

Generally in games the writing IS shit, which is depressing and I think as a medium it needs to be improved (or it needs to find ways of kidnapping good writers).

 

[Savagezion]

I don't think writing is the problem in games really. Yeah, we get a Mass Effect 3 plot or Dragon Age 2 dialogue or even a FFX dialogue-plot combo all on infrequent occassions but I think the most common offender is dull characters. As in characters that aren't interesting due to having seen them 100 times before. It's the whole "if every game protagonist is EPIC" then none of them truly are. Master Chief is 1 of over 100 "epic" space marines. You can argue he was the first, but who cares really? First doesn't mean better - it means first. Besides, I think Samus was the first.

My point is though that many character archetypes just stop at archetype and rarely get personalized or personified as characters. One of my long time grevances with Tomb Raider was that it was almost like Crystal dynamics refused to evolved Lara outside of who she was in the first two games. SHe never evolved, her world never evolved. I would play the newest Tomb Raider release and she would see some bad guy she "knew" and I was like "Hey wtf, I have played every game! Why don't I know who the hell that is? When did she mean them?" only to find out apparently it was in between games at some point. How did her father die? 7 or 8 games later and I still don't fucking know. What did he do that made him so important? 7 or 8 games later, I still don't fucking know. If you aren't going to explore the character why should I give a damn?

That is the main offense I see commited by games.That is why people pride Bioware games. You DO get to fully explore their characters. That is why so many people in regards to story also dislike Bethesda, because their characters are like those robots at Chucky Cheese that sing songs. The world feels so alive until you visit the living in a Bethesda game. Then it feels like they say ",PLAYER_NAME" EVen RDR which I love, I find John to be rather dull because he is the stereotypical "good" bad guy. Although, props to the writing team for making a reference to that in a dialogue with Bonnie. The writing in that game is pretty awesome. Irish, the snake oil salesman, some good characters were in there. They were all stereotypes though. I've seen them plenty of times before.

However, in closing I will also say that good intriguing characters are hard to craft. It is that aspect that is the core of how intriguing they are, in fact. However, a story only needs one or two intriguing characters. Any more than that and you have something truly special on your hands.

 

[SonicWaffle]

What do you think? (Please, this is about the quality of writing in games, it isn?t a gender argument. Please stay on topic.)

Writing for games is always going to be harder, because of the interactivity factor. It's one of the few mediums where the viewer lives a story rather than passively observing it. When crafting a more linear experience the writer can decide what they want to show, when they show it, how things are revealed without having to worry that the end user is going to be too distracted searching nearby trashcans for ammo to spot the big secret reveal.

All players take some responsibility for character creation, as we all create slightly different images in our head. My Booker DeWitt is not yours, your Mario is not quite mine. I don't think the problem is down to bad writers as such, but more that even good writers likely struggle with writing for a medium where the end user takes control of the narrative. The impulse is probably to tell rather than show - hence why we get big set-piece scenes in games, particularly FPS, at moments when the game really wants you to pay attention - because when you work your plotlines into the world itself you risk a player speedrunning past it and ignoring your hard work.

Not entirely sure how we get around that issue. Maybe we don't. As you pointed out, movies have been around a lot longer than games, as has television, and the ratio of well-written products versus shit writing is probably about the same. For every great movie there are a hundred terrible ones. Maybe all we can do is keep celebrating the good writing as and when we get it, and keep enjoying those games without good writing for the games that they are. An action blockbuster doesn't sell itself on the writing, and a game aiming for the same demographic doesn't necessarily need to either.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I guess to show what I mean by my thoughts on there already being good writing in games. I'll just look at my game library real quick, without doing an in depth examination. The games I have that I consider to have good writing... Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter, Rune Factory 3, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Sola To Robo, Super Robot Taisen: Endless Frontier, Monster Tale, the Ace Attorney series, Ghost Trick, Cave Story, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Megaman ZX Advent, Megaman Zero series, Radiant Historia, Sonic Rush, Theresia, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, The World Ends With You, Zero Escape: Virtues Last Reward, Megaman Battle Network series, Hotel Dusk, Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, and the Boktai series. That's just me looking quickly at the portable games I have in next to my bed, I have many more examples in the rest of my collection.

And something this made me realize is that a lot of the cases where you can point to bad writing in video-games is more due to hardware limitations than a lack of writing ability. The Atari, NES, Sega Master System, Game Boy, Game Gear and early PC games just weren't able to have plots in a lot of those cases. Whether a game has a good plot or not can probably have a lot to do with the limitations of the hardware and whether story was even a priority for the people making the game.

 

[EvilRoy]

And something this made me realize is that a lot of the cases where you can point to bad writing in video-games is more due to hardware limitations than a lack of writing ability. The Atari, NES, Sega Master System, Game Boy, Game Gear and early PC games just weren't able to have plots in a lot of those cases. Whether a game has a good plot or not can probably have a lot to do with the limitations of the hardware and whether story was even a priority for the people making the game.

That got me thinking back a little bit. You know back in the days of floppy floppies there were a couple collections of games that were re-released (I can't quite remember which, although I want to say some of the early Ultima games were in one) because they were so successful. In order to save space so they could use fewer disks, the publisher actually printed out all the story text into these little booklets and had the programmers go back into the games and switch out text for references to sections in the book.

This was a huge deal at the time because it could cut the size of a game down by something like 25% or more depending on how text heavy it originally was. Really makes you think about what kind of limitations games had in storage space alone, I mean, think of having to literally double the manufacturing costs of a videogame just because you wanted to add a few more pages of description/dialog and it bumped you up to two disks. If I was in charge of budgeting you bet your ass there would be one princess, one tower to describe and one villain with lines and that is it.