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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.

The very best narrative games, like Red Dead 2, have a very good sense of place and some good vaguely natural sounding dialogue. They play with the viewer or player’s emotions a little. They can generate pathos. Some games have a few good jokes, a few good cutscenes, a few neat moments.

But the writing and character development of these is still pretty mediocre. The best we can do is either “I’m dying and I’m sad about it” (RDR2, Cyberpunk) or “I’m a sad dad” (Last of Us, God of War). We can also do “I put references to political science 101 in my game” (Disco Elysium). I don’t think I can name a single game with great writing. I can name games with decent, maybe even good writing that I enjoyed, but I’ve enjoyed far too much slop in my time to believe that’s an indicator of actual quality.

Perfect Tides and its sequel.

If you don't at least think the protagonist is well-written, who (from some other media) would you consider a well-written character?

Which games have good characters, really? I mean really good character writing.

The original Marathon had great writing.

You've already made this point several times on The Motte. But what's your benchmark? Can you name a single movie with great writing that you can point at and say, "this is what I want video game writing to be like"? Or a single song with great writing?

I am deliberately not asking about books because video games are a mixed medium. Books are pure written word, and thus cannot be held to the same standard as works where writing is just one part of the whole.

If you’d like to make fun of my bad taste I’m happy to name a bunch of examples any time. But to me I think the Ebert thing, of judging a movie by its intentions, is mostly what I mean. Is there a game for kids as well written as Toy Story 2? I don’t think Mario Galaxy or Lego Batman really compare. Is there an all-ages action adventure that has the self-propelled scale and rhythm of a Star Wars 5 or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Uncharted 2 is closer to an Uwe Boll movie than it is to them. Is there a major VN or ‘episodic story’ game that has the romantic depth and natural dialogue of a Before Sunset, that so captures the feeling of falling in love? ‘Life is Strange’ really isn’t in the same universe, let alone the same league. Is there a Mafia game that comes close, even fractionally, to Goodfellas, let alone The Godfather? And these are just big Hollywood movies.

Not rafa, but:

Amish Paradise comes to mind.

(Also at least 5-10% of Vysotsky’s repertoire should qualify. «Расстрел горного эха» is a gold standard for writing alone.)

Silent Hill 2 etches a surprisingly nuanced and complex portrayal of a grieving widower, touching on some of the ugly realities of watching one's spouse slowly succumb to illness that even unvarnished warts-and-all literary fiction avoids confronting. While it's at it, the game includes a secondary character who is a victim of repeated incestuous rape as a child and succeeds in making them seem believable, sympathetic and three-dimensional.

Spec Ops: The Line depicts a well-meaning protagonist with admirable goals, whose monomaniacal stubbornness and refusal to take responsibility for his actions (indeed, refusal to even acknowledge the consequences of his actions) and steadily declining mental acuity combine to make him progressively more unlikeable and loathsome. The lead writer described him as a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is his inability to reconcile the disparity between the man he would like to be and the man he really is. Even if you don't buy into the meta aspects of the game's presentation, Walker is a masterclass in writing a character who is believeable and unlikeable, while still retaining the player's sympathy.

KOTOR was pretty fun — would’ve made a good movie.

Did you just casually spoil the main story in those first two games? Ever heard of spoiler tags?

I spoiled the premise of a 6 and an 8 year old game, in the sense that both of those ‘reveals’ happen in perhaps the first quarter of the games.

Hmm.. Almost anything Chris Avellone has touched comes to mind.

Ever play Myst 3?

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