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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28159 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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You know what we didn't have in a good while? A proper gamer drama.

All the actors from the past decade are basically defunct: Sarkeesian largely ceased publishing after the parted ways with McIntosh (my long-standing belief is that he was the brains behind the operation, and she alone just couldn't make enough quality material to stay relevant), Zoe van Valkenburg's last claim to relevance was an accusation against another of her exes in 2019, resulting in his suicide soon after. Youtube continues to steal lunch money from written articles about games, so Polygon and Kotaku are shells of their former selves. Vice's Waypoint has come and gone, and the only thing of note they did was having to apologize after posting a 9S forcefem fanfiction on main.

There has been some occasional flareups here and there, but nothing that could possibly rise to the 2014's heights of in(s)anity. Dare I say... until now?

You probably haven't heard of Sweet Baby Inc.. It's a "narrative consulting" company that specializes in retooling the game's scripts to better represent historically underrepresented groups. Notable releases with which they worked in the past few years include God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2 and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. For those of you who don't play often, the former two were generally favorably received, while the latter was a critical and commercial bomb that was dead in the water for years before its launch and probably killed the development studio.

The broader public (by which I mean the narrow, extremely online subset of the fandom) learned about its existence some time last year. People have been coming up with some wild conjectures about what exactly SBI's involvement was with those games. Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something. I am of two minds - most of the examples usually provided seem to be deliberately taken in-between frames, but still it's a bit weird how Japanese devs like Capcom, Platinum or Kojima Studios don't have those issues.

But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either:

  • Jon Stewart gets called "one of the good ones" with some bizarre anti-cop writing. I think it's written in-character from Harley's perspective, but still.
  • Most of the (mind-controlled, hance they're the bad guys in the game) Justice League die pathetic deaths, in one case almost getting literally pissed on. But somehow Wonder Woman is immune to Brainiac's brainwashing and gets to have a dignified, dramatic moment, at least comparably.
  • Also WW: her society is brought up as superior to ours, having solved issues such as toxic masculinity.
  • And then there's the case of Miles Morales having wrong country's flag in his home. Representation!

Oh, and as you probably expect at this point, SBI's members have been occasionally seen on twitter gloating about how the hold white male gamers in contempt. I've given up twitter and tumblr for Lent, so I won't be providing specific examples here, sorry.

A few days ago, a steam curator was created listing all the games that have SBI's involvement as "not recommended". The situation is played out predictably: some employees claimed harassment, the steam group got Streisand Effect'd and grew to 200k over the last two days, it has been mass reported, people are trolling in the fora claiming to have insider info, the forum got wiped... Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people. It's all 2012-2015 discourse frozen in amber, time is a flat circle. The only difference now is that because it's Musk's twitter, the statement gets stamped with a community note. Contrary to what I wrote at the beginning, it'll probably blow over in a few days, but I decided to do a writeup just in case.

Myself, I haven't bought a western AAA game since 2017, and I wish all of you the same.

But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either

There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people.

Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.

Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something.

Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.

Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.

Mass Effect Andromeda

This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.

  • -10

almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

If you put Marvel movies, Tolkien, Lem, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Vernor Vinge and Ursula K. Le Guin in the same quality bag then it is not a very useful bag.

Unless by "science fiction and fantasy garbage" you meant "garbage tier materials from this genres", not "all fantasy and SF is garbage"?

Tolkien isn’t fantasy garbage, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that the average quality of fantasy writing that fantasy writers consume is even remotely close to Tolkien’s level. To be clear, I’m not making the point that all literary fiction is on the level of Joyce or Austen either, but the average quality in the fantasy space - particularly in games - is much lower.

Oh, I am not suggesting that all fantasy it of not terrible quality. But the same goes for classical literature.

Except that for old stuff higher-quality is less likely to be forgotten.

I was protesting against "understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability" being necessary (unless you count say Tolkien as classical literature).

I am not going to argue how average work in fantasy compares to average work in literature, in both cases at least 90% of things will be terrible waste of time.

almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage

I've no idea where you get your ideas about 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ? Bottom of the barrel WH40k or Star Wars novels ? But generally popular and acclaimed writers of either can write. I'd argue that SF writing in the last 30 years completely pwns "Golden Age of SF" writing. Standards have risen.

Problem isn't what they read, problem is they don't practice writing much. Which is why they suck.

I think it’s kinda both. I think in order to be able to write passable fiction in science fiction and fantasy it’s absolutely essential to get out of that genre in your reading. Not because science fiction and fantasy are all bad, but because without a rounded literary toolkit you end up lacking tools that can make your story more interesting. Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.

I’ll also suggest that I suspect that a lot of game writers are failed screenwriters and novelists.

Use mystery and clue dropping to get more tension in a story rather than simply info-dump. Use stuff from romance so your characters feel like they’re actually hot for each other. Use horror elements to make enemies that are actually scary.

You don't read recent sf much, right? You could learn all that without ever leaving the genre-

Of course there are science fiction and fantasy writers who ‘can write’, often better than the majority of literary fiction writers. But those who can are only very rarely writing film, let alone video games. Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.

Look at BG3, you can tell it’s trash written by fanfiction writers.

Bad fanfiction writers too. There's a fuckton of them on DA, and most are trash. But some are actually decent-ish.

E.g. the guy who's written the best (erotica genre redacted) Witcher fanfics I've read would probably do a better job than the BG3 writing team.

Peter Watts and Richard Morgan co-wrote the script for Crysis 2, and their absence shows in 3. Crysis Legion is a rare example of a "tie-in videogame novel" that stands alone as great military scifi. Hmm, maybe I should re-read it.

That makes me think of one of the big points at the end of Shamus Young's excellent writeup on what went wrong with Mass Effect. Writers have a particular style that shows through in their work, and you can't just switch writers in the middle of the series without alienating people who were enjoying the first writer's style. Sounds like Crytek ran face first into the same trap as Bioware did.

Watts is doing almost nothing but games / TV writing now, saying publishers aren't interested.

Seems to be almost all uncredited. Talked about NDAs often too. Imdb has nothing so. He's not googleable - Peter Watts is an incredibly common name. I should ask him, I swapped a few emails with him over the years.

Not sure how this is connected to his online spat with the murderously sociopathic SJW Thai Chinese lesbian heiress. Assuming that's something that probably makes him more than toxic.

/images/1709903473261996.webp

I'd still like you to defend the idea that the problem is SF writers not reading enough classics. I recently had a "Ima reconnect with my roots" moment, and decided to read one of the books that was on the mandatory reading list when I was in school. I even picked one that I spontaneously recalled the other day, thinking about the state of the world, so it should be interesting, seeing how it popped up when I was thinking about stuff, but it was just... mid. My memory of it's themes and message was better than the actual thing itself. The only way you can appreciate it, is if you have deep passion for history, and want to figure out how and about what people used to think in the past, and/or the history of literature, and you enjoy watching how the medium evolved over the years. But the thing in itself? Absolutely, horribly, disgustingly, mid.

I swear, if all that survives of our current era of media is Marvel movies, people like you will be absolutely adamant they're classics, and modern plebeian writers are shit, because they don't have an appreciation for them.

I was tempted to make reference to Half-Life, which was a revolution in storytelling in games (or FPS games, at least), and that game's main writer was indeed a sci-fi writer who had published some works in the 90's before coming to Valve.

Marathon had some of the best writing in a video game I've ever encountered. Incredibly immersive.

I agree, but at the same time, Marathon is kind of a unique case thanks to it being part of Bungie's insane rabbithole of deep lore (not even the bouncing ball from Gnop! is safe!).

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

D&D geeks have been writing nothing but in-jokes and sci-fi references since before MCU films were good, and WAY before they were bad. I'm surprised you didn't use the boo-word "capeshit." Being incredibly derivative and tropey are would be an improvement over woke writing.

D&D geeks have been writing nothing but in-jokes and sci-fi references

Excuse me, sir, we don't call those "in-jokes and sci-fi references", we call that "allusion and intertextuality".

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

All the same, I will gladly take the ending paragraph after beating Quake, pictured below, to the utterly preposterous current year demoralization nonsense crammed into every nook and cranny of a modern AAA game. Bizarre out of context quips shitting on capitalism, men, white people, etc. There is something totally orthogonal to the quality of the writing going on here. There is a naked contempt, a visceral unmasked casual hatred, that oozes out of every pore of modern AAA game writing, totally independent of it's quality. The only thing the quality achieves is putting a thin veneer of artistic acceptability on it, where as the worst examples are just unhinged.

Edit: Tried to attach the screenshot of Quake's victory screen, threw an error, you can look it up. Sorry.

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.

The average work of canonical literature is, in my opinion, not that good, and most of these works have "stood the test of time" only due to accidents of history, rather than their own intrinsic merits. This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity. The average sci-fi story ranges from "meh" to "ok", just like how the average work of "literary" fiction ranges from "meh" to "ok". It's debatable how many truly Great Books have ever even been written - think of how many physics books/articles throughout history have truly advanced the frontier of understanding in a deep and meaningful way, compared to the mountain of unread and irrelevant papers produced each year to feed the tenure committee machine. All domains of human activity function in essentially the same way, including art, including "high" art.

Of course I'm by no means advocating for total aesthetic anarchism. Some works are better than others; some works are really bad and some works are really great. And being conversant in artistic theory and the history of art will help artists produce better works instead of worse ones. I just want to be careful that we're not engaging in a knee-jerk elevation of the classical just because it's classical. In fact 20th/21st genre fiction has made clear advancements that were largely undreamt of in previous eras of literature, particularly in terms of the range of plot structures and character types that it treats.

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.

The property is called "not having a second leg to stand upon". Genre fiction has two legs: the literature leg and the genre leg. It can have bland characters that talk like it's an autist convention, but it's offset by also having murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation (I can't get over how much this sounds like farming) etc.

Classical literature has only one leg. It has mundane characters that are stuck in mundane situations. How do you make the readers eagerly follow the brooding stream of consciousness of a father of two (three) that has every component of the American dream, but is deeply unhappy, if you can't lure them with murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation?

Classical literature has only one leg. It has mundane characters that are stuck in mundane situations.

The "second leg" of literary fiction is form and prose quality; the language of the book itself making itself apparent as an independent object with intrinsic aesthetic merit, instead of acting as a transparent window through which the content of the story is viewed.

See: Joyce's Ulysses, Nabokov's Pale Fire.

How do you make the readers eagerly follow the brooding stream of consciousness of a father of two (three) that has every component of the American dream, but is deeply unhappy, if you can't lure them with murder mysteries, aliens, dragons, dark and handsome billionaires that are into BDSM, superheroes, scary supernatural shit, funny antics or cultivation?

There's no law that says that "classical" literature can't have anything interesting happen.

The Iliad has many elements that would be at home in a Marvel movie. Shakespeare racked up quite the body count over the course of his oeuvre, particularly in the lesser-known but notably violent Titus Andronicus. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow caused some commotion upon its release due to its lurid sexual content.

The "second leg" of literary fiction is form and prose quality; the language of the book itself making itself apparent as an independent object with intrinsic aesthetic merit, instead of acting as a transparent window through which the content of the story is viewed.

That is the part of its first and only leg, I guess I did a poor job of implying that. Unless you meant one could write great literary fiction that was masterful prose, but told nothing and went nowhere.

There's no law that says that "classical" literature can't have anything interesting happen.

The Iliad has many elements that would be at home in a Marvel movie. Shakespeare racked up quite the body count over the course of his oeuvre, particularly in the lesser-known but notably violent Titus Andronicus. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow caused some commotion upon its release due to its lurid sexual content.

I didn't say that. Something Happened is one of my favourite books and is filled with mundane, but interesting events.

Of course, the works that end up being selected are probably better than the contemporary average, if the selection process adds any value whatsoever.

But yes, there are no special qualities to classics, nor are English departments especially powerful selectors for value, especially when there's inertia to maintain.

That is not to say that the books are bad—the Count of Monte Cristo is delightful, Les Miserables is enjoyable, A Tale of Two Cities is fun, Austen isn't bad. Verne's nice (though is that veering into the realm of science fiction)? Of course, some are much worse.

Perhaps one reason, though, that @2rafa considered science fiction and fantasy garbage is if they are meant more to entertain, whereas the other books are meant to shed light on the human condition or something.

I would think, though, that science fiction often does that better, by putting humans in more radically altering frames (saying this as someone who has not read much science fiction).

(This is not the only way in which things could be considered trash.)

I would think, though, that science fiction often does that better, by putting humans in more radically altering frames (saying this as someone who has not read much science fiction).

As someone who has read a fair bit of sci-fi, this is exactly the strength of sci-fi, using the fantastical to ask the hard questions. A number of sci-fi books are made school-required reading for this reason.

This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.

It's the Matthew principle all over again! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I think it's probably best to see "literary fiction" as a genre, not a quality marker (TM). It's a style and set of focuses that people, even today, choose deliberately to write in -- and some don't. And, within the modern literary fiction works, few are very good, and even fewer than that will ever be remembered.

Our view of the past is colored, always, by what has survived. Sometimes things survive because they just truly are brilliant and inescapably good, and people can't help talking about them. Sometimes, however, they survive because of being in the right place at the right time. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, I enjoyed reading it. But no one today would ever have heard of it had it not had it's post-war resurgence due to soldiers reading it during the war. It was, like you said, a historical accident.

I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good"

If you want to be classy you don't write sff, you write "speculative fiction"

Atwood's infamous talking squids comment comes to mind.

Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.

I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.

I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.

I was going to make a similar comment about how VG writing is just bad, but I don't think it's just because they're nerds. It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.

It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.

You're just not paying attention, is all.

Writing is a craft. Maybe there's slightly fewer writers now, and sure publishing is broken, but ..are you really reading? ( There are solid younger writers out there. No, they're never g oing to be featured in any magazine or be famous, though.

When it comes to literature I am certainly not paying enough attention, I basically don't read anything contemporary besides excerpts here and there, and so I don't really have the grounds to make such a sweeping statement. But regarding "scripted" media, screenwriting, I feel pretty up to date on how things have degraded from what highs we managed to reach in the past.

On the other hand, when you talk about writers who can't even get in a magazine I feel like I just don't care. It's like when everyone says there music is just as good these days, you just have to find certain bands etc. It's just nothing like the amount of experience and culture of excellence in the music industry in say the 70s that elevated everyone together. Art goes beyond individuals, and plucky youths can only get so far. I don't think there are exceptions to this rule, I think great art always comes through the world as a movement, and dies out with the movement, and the fame is part of that, because it's how the culture spreads, it orients people's motivations, and puts great expectations on the artists to continue to grow and deliver, see Goethe. Even Van Gogh, the talented loser, wanted to be famous, and was part of a great movement, even though no one gave a shit about him till he died, he was still elevated by the works around him and elevated others in turn.

On the other hand, when you talk about writers who can't even get in a magazine I feel like I just don't care. It's like when everyone says there music is just as good these days, you just have to find certain bands etc. It's just nothing like the amount of experience and culture of excellence in the music industry in say the 70s that elevated everyone together.

This is a good framing of the issue, because saying things like "everything sucks now" rounds off to old men rambling about the kids these days, when it doesn't matter how talented the kids these days are, when the cultural infrastructure to support that talent is just not there. It's also more in line with the pop-culture-war criticism that's been accumulating over the years.

I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.

It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.

I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?

Yeah, I think there needs to be a kind of environmental momentum, and the critics are part of that. From the critic side I think it's a combination of ideological capture plus the poptimism movement which I think is actually the worse offender in terms of lowering standards.

And yeah your thoughts on punch ups makes a lot of sense to me. My imagination just tells me no one wants to say no to the writers room, everyone just wants to flatter each other and avoid confrontation, that kind of thing, that seems to be the attitude in the air these days.

I think it's because everyone just does less. People used to be travelers, craftsmen, soldiers before they were writers, and the decades of life's experience flowed into their work. Nowadays people sit passively browsing information for hours on end, and base their writing on other books they have read, one more layer removed from reality.

I think there's something to this. Particularly in how so many character dynamics seem to reflect stuff that might be the most stressful part of a modern writer's lives, just transplanted to some fictional setting, such as, e.g. a fantasy princess rebelling against her arranged marriage in favor of her lesbian love interest, as was the case in Willow, I believe. Or in Star Wars, Admiral Holdo talking down to her hotshot male underling Poe for being a hotshot male who is upset that, as the leader, she hasn't communicated to her troops any information that would give them confidence that she has a plan for keeping the Resistance alive. There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate.

This extends to action scenes, of course, which break laws of physics in egregious suspension-of-disbelief-breaking ways that, say, Jackie Chan or even wire-fu Jet Li films didn't, which shows how little the choreographers or directors knew about actual combat and making it look believable (not necessarily realistic) within the setting. To say nothing of the even greater crime against good taste with the terrible camera work and uninteresting choreography you see in so many works (e.g. even the terrible The Matrix Revolutions from 2 decades ago had better choreography in its worst action scene than the even worse Resurrection had in its best one).

But I think there has to be more than this, because one very common refrain you see from writers in general and certainly the types of writers who support the promotion of (certain) agendas in writing is the power of fiction and narrative to change and influence people. There is no shortage of fiction from the past that they could learn things like how military structure works and why it works that way and how that would look when transplanted to a similar situation in a galaxy far, far away. It takes non-trivial research to get all this right, but personal experience, direct or indirect, isn't a requirement for writing these things well, or at least much better than what we're seeing these days.

And the fact that we see incredible incompetence in following basic narrative rules like characters going through arcs or setup and payoff also points at a deeper issue. These are things that someone who got a C in an undergrad creative writing course would understand and avoid. Some of it is surely that the garbage of the past got forgotten, so we're comparing the best of the past to the average of today. But there are like-for-like comparisons that can be made. E.g. the recent live-action Pinocchio remake presenting Pinocchio as an innocent bystander who only ever got dragged to doing bad things instead of giving into his temptations and learning from the negative consequences of them, along with his iconic lying-leads-to-nose-lengthening being used to help him get out of the cage instead of being punishment for lying to the fairy, shows that the writers simply didn't have a handle on the underlying themes of the story. They say that rules are made to be broken, but they also say that you should understand a rule before you break it, and the understanding of why these narrative rules were determined to be so good and useful that they were labeled as "rules" in the first place seems to be missing.

I think a lot of the problems stem from the professional inbreeding of writing and filmmaking. You are certainly correct about people having less lived experience. I would argue that in a lot of ways it goes much much further. In order to make it in Hollywood, you have to go to film school, and by the nature of college and student loans, you have to come from a certain stock to have the ability to study film, creative writing, or acting in school, As in at least upper middle class with a mommy and daddy able and willing to not only foot the college bill but support this budding Hollywood star for years while they worked on getting in. So we’re talking about at least 50 years removed from the time when their ancestors did ordinary manual labor in a factory, repair shop, store, or building site. They exist both in their families and among their peers in a world where nobody takes religion seriously. They also are not the kinds of people who watch boxing or MMA on TV and certainly have never been in a fight themselves. They don’t know anyone who’s been in the military. All of this means that not only does our author know nothing, but he’s surrounded by know nothings. And he’s likewise been taught by no nothings.

There’s not much of a chance that a person who’s never seen a real fight and never took so much as a karate lesson is ever going to understand fighting. And someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been a cop or soldier can’t possibly understand the mentality of those professions.

There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR).

Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1 and Heart of the winter, Planescape Torment, Batman Arkham Asylum and City (lets pretend the others didn't happen, please), VTmB, Silent Hill 2 & 3, Soul Reaver 1 & 2, Clive Barker Undying, Portal 1 (okay, not quite AAA but brilliant), Portal 2 (weaker writing than portal 1, but classes above most of the modern crap), Assassin's creed II, Fallout New Vegas,

I would say that in the golden age of PC games - roughly 1997 - 2007 -sh good writing was expected from games that were supposed to have writing.

Edit: Freya in God Of war and god of war ragnarok have quite the visual differences and not in the favor of the ragnarok ones.

You didn't even mention Deus Ex

Half Life 2 was interesting. Breen's speeches about collaboration were kind of thought-provoking. Humanity got stomped in the war, it makes sense to collaborate and evade total destruction. He wasn't a stock bad guy, even though the collaboration he oversaw was the slow death of humanity.

There's lots of rich ambience going on in that game, lots of implications left for players to come debate: G-man, the Vortigaunts...

Fall From Heaven 2 also has pretty good writing IMO, at least the base version of the mod does. The modmods get a bit crazy and weaker.

It's one of the few pieces in a subgenre of science fiction that I love which is seeing humanity deal with getting colonized by a much more powerful force.

There's V of course, but that's kinda campy by today's standards, Colony was great but got cancelled, and Captive State was really well executed but still fairly obscure.

I think it's underutilized which is a shame because it's a setup that allows you to completely erase cultural and ethnic lenses and deal with colonization as a pure concept and understand how people who may think of it completely differently from you are coming from.

HL2 is also cool in that I think it legitimately contains the most totalitarian society ever depicted in fiction. I've yet to see worse than the Combine. And yet it seems so understated and natural (unlike the more typically gloomy ambience of the beta). They're not cackling in your face, you just see the effects of a system, and the implications are horrifying if you think about it for a minute. It's great storytelling.

The Three body problem series gets into that kind of thing, albeit from different angles. There's also parts of the Xeelee sequence that deal with it.

HL2 was great, I think a big part of a game's quality is in how many fanatics it generates. The people who go to great efforts making mods. Gmod, Entropy Zero 1 & 2, Black Mesa... the Half-Life franchise produced an enormous fountain of creativity.

Planescape likely has the highest volume of text among those infinity engine options. But if you were to compile every bit of it into a pdf book, which some have, and read through it as a novel without the game giving it an interactive body, you’d find it is pretty lame and cringe standing on its own. I don’t know of any good writing in games off the top of my head, save for a recent run though Disco Elysium.

I'm not sure how compelling "game writing is bad if you remove it from the context of the game" is meant to be?

Yes, just reading a text dump of the game isn't very entertaining. But games are games, and the writing in it serves the purposes of the game as an integrated whole. It's like pointing out that just reading a film script is usually worse than reading an equivalent novel. Of course it is! It would be bizarre for it not to be!

Ironically I actually disliked Disco Elysium - I found it clunky and unappealing as a game, and I found its writing a bit too precious; notably I actively disliked the gimmick where your skills talk to you, as if you're a schizophrenic. But I think the point holds. Game writing ought to be evaluated in the context of an entire game, and it is no sign of bad writing that it doesn't stand up if removed from that context.

Let me take a specific example. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd argue it has great writing. If you just read its script you might find that surprising, but I think its script contextualises its gameplay really well, and successfully contributes to the overall success of the game. Some of the game's most effective moments work because of the writing - stepping out on to Hyrule Field for the first time is a very memorable moment, and that's achieved due to the graphics, music, etc., but also because the story has contextualised what that means by making you spend the first hour or two of the game in this restricted, dense forest environment while reminding you that Link has never left this area, that nobody ever leaves the forest because they fear they'll die, and that Link is nonetheless adventurous at heart. The huge field rising before you, the horizon, the iconic swell of music is all powerful, and the writing contributes to it. Even if no one element by itself is that amazing.

To me, that's what good game writing looks like.

as if you're a schizophrenic

What you mean, "as if"? The detective is quite obviously mentally ill.

Baldur's Gate 1&2,

Look, I love Baldur's Gate as much as the next DnD geek, but its writing on its own was not very good. I love Ed Greenwood and Forgotten Realms as a setting (I am currently running a DnD game set near Neverwinter right now) but his writing is, well saying derivative is putting it very kindly. Icewind Dale is renowned for being even more of a combat simulator than BG1 and 2. I thought the Arkham's were good games, but their story was just very basic Batman.

I will definitely give you Planescape, VtMB and New Vegas though. Portal was ok, Silent Hill were very hit and miss. Undying I will say was very true to Clive Barker, but he is definitely an acquired taste.

Look, I love Baldur's Gate as much as the next DnD geek, but its writing on its own was not very good. I love Ed Greenwood and Forgotten Realms as a setting (I am currently running a DnD game set near Neverwinter right now) but his writing is, well saying derivative is putting it very kindly.

Yea, worldbuilding and attention to detail are Ed's strenghts, if you like fantasy kitchen sink world of pseudohistorical cultures where everyone has lots of fun.

Ed answering his fans questions on Realms discussion forum, Twitter or Discord is example of this creativity.

"Dear Ed, in 1992 supplement "The Shithole Lands" in chapter five "The Plague Swamp" on page 142 there is map of town of Rotting Hollow. On the map key number 116 marks house of Grug the Grumpy. Who is Grug and what happened to him he is so crotchety?"

And Ed immediately answers with long detailed treatise about Grug, his origins, his family, his friends, his exploits, his business deals, his hobbies and his sex life.

Exactly right, and I think that is certainly why it has been the most popular DnD setting for a long time. It is great as a setting for a game, it is entertaining.

Well, Hasbro hadn't thought so and burned it all down.

True fans do not forget and do not forgive. Grey Box forever.

It's ok, it all went back to prior to Spellplague pretty much. That's the gas leak edition. I've always been leery about Forgotten Realms having in universe reasons for edition changes. It's not like Greyhawk did the same, though of course Greyhawk is an intensely bland setting.

Why not Fallout 1/2 and Arcanum as well?

Fallout was good but changed a lot between 1 and 2. Arcanum was excellent though. One of my favorite games of all time despite the gameplay being very janky.

How did Fallout change from 1 to 2? I played both and found it to be a straightforward continuation of all the good stuff the first brought.

At the time, there was a lot of vocal critics of the tonal shift from 1 to 2. 1 was a much darker, dirtier, more hopeless portrayal (with some few exceptions, the Tardis and so on), where 2 leaned much more into comedy. You can see some of the follow through of that into New Vegas and beyond where you could take perks or enable the "sillier" elements (Wild Wasteland trait I think). Indeed that trait was a compromise between the developers who preferred the wilder and wackier tone against the more "grounded" one.

To steal a random comment or two:

"I played Fallout 1 and 2 back to back. Fallout 2 felt insulting to Fallout 1. Sure, there's a lot more content, but it's absurdly immature.

LOL PORNO. LOL MAGIC THE GATHERING. LOL ASIAN PEOPLE. LOL SCIENTOLOGY. LOL GETTIN' RAPED BY A SUPER MUTANT. LOL DAN QUALE."

"Fallout was kind of like Wasteland, but different. Fallout 2 was kind of like Wasteland, but worse."

"I'm old and played the games as they came out, though I was young. Fallout is a masterpiece, Fallout 2 is too silly for me. I like the darker tone, which is probably part of why I loved 3 as well. It sucks that 2 didn't even improve the gameplay. Contrast that with Baldur's Gate, which was a great game followed by a sequel that is probably my favorite PC game of all time."

And of course if you want to start an argument on RPGCodex you can simply mention that the retcon (in Fallout 2) about vaults being social experiments rather than actual attempts to save people, was a superior choice and watch the fires burn... not as hot as if you claim Fallout 3 is a good game of course, like the chap above. We prestigious monocled gentlemen have standards after all.

If I'm remembering correctly, the extremely hardcore Fallout fans complain that Fallout 2 had different humor. I can't remember how. Maybe Fallout 2 had too many pop culture references? Or it was more wacky and zany instead of dark and dry?

I, like yourself, noticed no such thing on my contemporary plays through them in 1997 and 1998.

Fallout 2 is very wacky and experimental in a good few ways and a few obnoxious ones (eg, that fucking temple tutorial). While the original Fallout had more than a few references and direct jokes, such as a Doctor Who popup as a random encounter, 2 integrated them much more heavily -- Goris as a talking deathclaw was a big pinch point even into the mid-00s, and there's a lot of emphasis on sex jokes. I don't mind the change, and 2 was still really dark comedy at times, but it was definitely a change.

((It was also a good bit more rushed; even today and with third-parties trying to fill in the gaps, there's a lot of jank or trimmed content. At release, it was just buggy. Having a mandatory combat final boss pissed a lot of people off.))

On the flip side, 1 was complete because it was comparatively tiny.

Too much pop culture and too wacky and zany were exactly the complaints yes. I like both and probably lean slightly towards 2 being better. But it was a big deal back in the day and still can cause flame wars in the right spaces.

Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture.

Death Stranding seemed to have pretty accurate facial models (except iirc Mama, who was definitely better looking in game than irl imo).

British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama)

Are there any extremely beautiful British actors?

Christian Bale, Tom Holland, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, John Boyega, Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Tom Hiddleston, Henry Cavill, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Nicholas Hoult, Orlando Bloom, Charlie Hunnam...

Note that all these people came to prominence in Hollywood, though. Beautiful Brits go where the money is - we're left with the remainder.

Are there any extremely beautiful British actors?

Henry Cavill, Robert Pattinson, Keira Knightley, Rachel Weisz, Ellie Bamber? A few that come to mind quickly.

In any case, in a country where being very hot isn’t a large part of the requirement for casting it would be expected that fewer very hot people would go into acting.

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