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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   26455 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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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):

  1. Video games have exploded in popularity. The amount of quality writing (and writers themselves) may have actually increased, but the signal-to-noise ratio has increased exponentially. I often find myself completely blindsided by games that I find quality, in that I've never heard of them before either being told via word-of-mouth or essentially stumbling upon them. I find this very much to be like music. If you look at the most popular music, I'd argue that it's in an awful spot, being borderline unlistenable while also being more popular than ever before. However, if you take the time to look for a niche, you can find some amazing stuff, even today, and it's all at your fingertips on YouTube. This of course torpedoes a bit of my thesis that quality has gone down, but I'll similarly pivot it as I do with music: Why is it impossible for games at the highest level of production and scale to have quality stories?
  2. I've noticed that sci-fi games are far more likely to qualify as "quality writing" for me. Even my contemporary examples (such as Prey) are sci-fi as well. That's not to say I can't enjoy other types, but I'm wondering if I either have a bias; if sci-fi lends itself to deeper writing, or attracts writers who can do so; or both. Note that I can give some very bad sci-fi examples of games (I am outspoken in how much I find Mass Effect completely awful in almost every way).
  3. I mentioned that my best examples are games with text-based dialogue and story. Perhaps those are easier to write, given that the player can mentally fill in lines in a way that makes sense to him. If you've ever looked up videos about Marathon, you have most definitely run into people reading the lines from the story out loud. I've yet to find a reading that hasn't made me cringe. I'm wondering if voice acted dialogue is just harder to write (and harder to fill with competent performances). But even then, a game I really love called Alpha Centauri has both written and voiced dialogue, and the voice lines are so good that they are literally chilling at times. That's a game from a group of about eight people, so that's an indicator that they just had to have the direction, wherewithal, and talent to see through their stories properly.

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?

I loved DE for the most part, but maybe I'm alone on this, but I felt it didn't quite stick the landing. In the early and mid parts of playing the game I was sure I would replay it in the future, at least once. I ended up not doing that because the ending deflated my enthusiasm. I got a "good" one after taking care of my character throughout. It kinda took away the mystique of the whole thing though, ending up pretty much "just-so". It was okay, not unbelievable. But I wanted something more than social realism. A lone, bitter old man who wanted to kill someone who got a woman he couldn't get, or something, partly due to being on the losing side of things as a communist. And some cryptid creature. What was the point of the journey? Harry ending up, for me, as slightly less of a wreck compared to the start. Cool, I guess... I would have wanted to hear more about the whole thing about the world being swallowed up by the Pale or whatever.

I’m aiming to finish the game this weekend, so I won’t get to your spoilers yet. I got up to confronting her before dying to a heart attack and shelving the game for a bit, and next thing I know, there’s been several patches.

It’s been on my mind recently after reading Sacred and Terrible Air, which…wow, that’s a book for a certain kind of Mottizen.

Good thing I used spoiler tags then. :D Have fun!

Has that book been released in English? Do you recommend it? What kind of Mottizen?

I appreciated the tags.

There are two English translations. I read this one, which was completely a volunteer effort. The other one was commissioned by fans; I’m not sure how the two differ.

It’s brilliantly written. If you enjoyed the prose stylings, the setting, the grotesque cast of DE, you will find more of that. Naturally, it’s also hilarious in that understated way.

There’s also excellent thematic cohesion. I hesitate to call it “commentary,” but…there’s a setting, and a plot, and these characters, and they all come together in service of a very specific feeling, sensation, zeitgeist.

It was a popular vacation area just outside of Vaasa that swallowed the four Lund girls. Along with their little bones and tan-lined skin, an entire era vanished. Six kilometres of winding coastline, a swimming spot popular in the fifties; rows of changing cabins, reeds rustling in the wind. Go there and find the age that conservatives long for. When parents could send children to the beach unsupervised, two reál for ice cream and bus fare in the pockets of their summer pants. Mum and dad would shake their heads in worry, keeping their children hidden from the news from Messina, from Graad, from Gottwald, where every week—it seemed to them—someone’s wee skeleton was found buried inside a stove wall. There, every week, someone’s daughter escaped onto the street after thirty years of captivity in a cellar and cried for help.
But not here.
Here we have a social democracy. And the soft peach blossoms of social democracy, innocuous social programs; these progressive things make a broken human soul feel better. The uncanny technical urge to construct a subterranean secret room—with a ventilation system where the air ducts on the front lawn are disguised as clay miniature windmills—will never reach these outskirts. Those dark, raging fevers of the mind simmer down in the cool mist here; the breath of distant blue glaciers freezes the sick thoughts that reside in a man’s head. Vaasa. A better place to live.

Perhaps you can see what kind of Mottizen I meant. The people who catch a glimpse of this feeling, but don’t just latch on to it unexamined. The ones who want to really interrogate their longing. I can’t stress enough how rare it is, the way SaTA engages with this.

There’s so much more I want to say, though I need to finish DE before I risk further commentary. Suffice to say I found the book very, very technically impressive.

But there’s a catch.

My understanding is that one or two sequels were intended. With the collapse of ZAUM, it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever get them. And SaTA cries out for just a bit more. It comes to a halt at a bizarre point in both plot and setting. Not rushed, but abrupt. I would describe it as two-thirds of an amazing book.

Depending on which parts of this review line up with your experience of DE, you may find SaTA fascinating or disappointing. Either way, there will probably be some frustration. I feel that, but I don’t regret reading it at all.

With the collapse of ZAUM

I'm still not entirely clear what went on there, but wow. Talk about getting what you wished for and the need to be careful when wishing. One taste of success, and suddenly all the comradeship goes out the window. A shame, I would love a sequel. Hard to know what the story would be, but there's enough of the world and its history that you could set it in a different part of the world, new characters, and still have a fascinating game.

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