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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):
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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