This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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):
Just to point out the obvious: Macs in the 90s were very much not the main gamer platform. It was almost a joke, how few games got ported to the mac. I mostly used macs in school, where I think it was seen as a plus that the only "games" on the mac were educational games. Instead it had its own, somewhat artsy-tartsy culture. I've never heard of those games you mentioned, but i'm not surprised the platform might have attracted some games with more sophisticated writing than the mainstream of Nintendo and MS-DOS.
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content. And so much of that content is just blatantly regurgitated from the limited Nerd Canon of Lord of the Rings/DnD/Star Wars/Star Trek, it's long since been exhausted, and the whole medium of "interactivity" just doesn't fit with having a fixed pre-written story.
Ahem
Ever heard of Sierra Entertainment or Lucasarts classic games? Star Control 2? Ultima IV? Fallout? Baldur's Gate?
yeah I've heard of them and I greatly enjoyed most of those. But looking back at them now as an adult, I don't see them as great writing. It seems more like stage directions to tell you what's going on in the game and keep you on track. Not to mention: it's all fantasy tropes that have been done a million times. Eg:
https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/media/screens/full/ultima_iv_-quest_of_the_avatar/ultima_iv-_quest_of_the_avatar_04.png Thanks for telling me it's a gypsy caravan, in case I couldn't have guessed just from the picture
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YJC1C8Tm3S0s8JptmC0V3k01K35JRIp5r0j8buUXOi3Gih97ggYLbBGSVMOkbDOZf8CcTg7jcJAmOxknvnTghy2jak0XMPQkn7XnQoJMvEEHEJ4qojGOGmtCybaJ1xPhUw: Explaining that we're on the edge of the map and can't move any further
https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/baldur_s_gate_retro_4.jpg.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp Is this dialogue? Or just random character lines to narrate the battle?
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Fallout-Harold-Dialogue-Cropped.jpg Infodumping the backstory
I shouldn't pick on these because the genre forces the writing to go a certain way. But still... you can see why none of this is exactly prizewinning literature, right?
This is like complaining that on page 83 of your printed book, there's the number 83 written in the corner and you think that nobody in the book has a reason to say "83" in character.
Even if it's a character who speaks the line (I can't access the link), that's a genre convention and has no bearing on writing quality.
It's a character, yeah. your magical owl companion in King's Quest 5 says "There's nothing a hot, dry desert further west. Most people avoid it, because there are bandits out there! If you insist on going, I'll wait for you HERE!"
It's just a very unsubtle way to tell the player "you can't leave the fixed game area," but dressed up in some fantasy cliches (why is the hot, dry desert full of bandits? How do they make a living if everyone avoids it...?). And most of the game writing is like that: engineering to serve the purposes of the game.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link