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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):
Deus Ex released in May 2000 with memorable writing, interesting choices, and a deliriously complicated setting. Between the cool factor and the memes, it’s remained relevant for decades.
Daikatana also released in May 2000, featuring…none of these things. It’s best known today for its questionable marketing.
I don’t take this as evidence of a trend in game writing or production. Our impressions are formed by outliers rather than the mean or median or even modal game for a year. We still get vivid, cohesive experiences from developers with a vision. Have you played Disco Elysium yet?
Good points. I think we need to differentiate between two groups:
The kind of mature industry that can churn out one Total War game per year, and a Modern Warfare every two years, and two Superhero games per year, and another Hero Shooter or Current-Thing-Clone so often they all just blend together...didn't exist in 2000. And didn't reach or cater to the same size and type of audience. Very very obviously the writing of the second group will be of a completely different nature than that of the first.
Both Sierra Entertainment and Lucasarts Games produced new games more or less yearly in the late 80s and early 90s. The difference is that many are considered all time classics and often feature on best of all time lists.
Eg. Lucasarts made Maniac Mansion (1987), Zac McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Loom (1990), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Monkey Island 2 (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993), Star Wars: Tie Fighter (1994) and that list is leaving out a lot of other games from them.
Fair point, but I would maintain that there is still a significant difference in reach and intended audience between the big-name game companies of the 90s and those of the 2020s.
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