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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).
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.
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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