Editorial: It’s a Little Out of Context

By Jeffrey Philipp | September 10, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Editorials, Quest Design, Writing

Hello again everyone.

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about the process and quality of writing for video games.

A lot of people have said a number of things about this topic over the years, and many of them are saying the same thing, that writing needs to or should be improved in video games. This is something I most certainly agree with.

Where I think I might differ from many people however, is that while many people might think that better writing means more words, I am of the opinion that if we had truly better writing for video games we would end up with far far fewer words coming at us.

I suppose I should clarify instead of continuing to sound like a lunatic. I am totally all for an improved level in the prose that exists in games, but I also thing that one aspect to the art of writing that is sorely lacking is the existence of context in a large majority of cases.

Now I warn you the thing that prompted this thought for me was not an MMO, but rather Fallout 3. I have been playing with Fallen Earth recently, and that has sort of rekindled my love for the good old wasteland and so I have been playing through the entire series alongside my time in Fallen Earth. When I got to the end of Fallout 3 I realized that there were some major decisions to be made, and in order to not give away any spoilers I won’t go into detail, but the information needed to complete a certain quest was not provided in the manner that one becomes so used to in MMO’s. Rather I had to understand the motivations and come to understand a certain character in order to obtain this information. While that description may seem woefully inadequate, it’s not my fault, it’s hard to talk without specifics.

It was a short while after that when I realized that I only completed that final quest by thinking of a person as a non-player character, emphasis on the character, rather than as simply an NPC.

For an example much older, but also actually related to the world of MMO’s a similar thing happened in a splendid old favourite of mine, Darkages. This time it was not just to me, or any one person in particular, but the entire population of the game had to glean important information from obscure and occasionally esoteric sources in order to best a powerful foe and expand the horizons of the playable universe.

I’m almost certain I’m the minority in this case, but I honestly think that quest descriptions, no matter how well reasoned or how flowery the language, would be greatly improved by adding a little dash of context in some fashion.

I think this for two main reasons, and a number of other little ones, but the two main reasons are the important ones.

The first reason I think players need less information thrown at them is immersion. When a quest reads like a laundry list, even a Dickensian laundry list, a player is going to treat it like a laundry list. These types of quests are distinct entities to players, and don’t in any meaningful way link a player to the larger game world. The simple act of getting a player to consider the world they’re playing in helps bring the entire game together and mesh the quest into the greater plot of the game.

The downside to that is that it requires players to learn just a little bit about the game world, which seems to be something that is falling by the wayside recently, but I hold out hope that it’s simply because the game world is currently being used as simply a place, rather than a living world.

The other reason that I think players need less information, is that we’ve all gotten quite lazy. That includes both players and developers. Almost never, in the recent past, have we as players treated NPC’s as anything more than poster boards with fliers for tasks that say reward on the bottom. Almost never do we actually think of NPC’s as characters with motivations, and empathizing with them in any way.

This may be, in part, because developers recently haven’t made NPC’s particularly worth empathizing with. Quest design recently, seems to focus almost entirely on the quest, and almost not at all on the person who is ostensibly asking you to complete this quest for them. as such they end up being entirely one dimensional. Clearly I’m not saying that every NPC in every game should be fully fleshed out and with a history going back three generations, but something that could conceivably cast a shadow at all would be nice.

The obvious problem with something like this, is that it puts a great deal more work on the plates of the already overworked writers in these games, and they may conceivably simply not have the time to create as vibrant a world as they would like. The only real solution to that problem is to increase the stature of game writers.

Screen writers are important figures in the movie world, and there have been many posters with taglines like “From the writer who brought you Murder Death Train 4 … “. I don’t want to feel like I’m overextending a metaphor or anything, but with the state of the video game industry these days, content writers for video games very much do have similar jobs to a number of those Hollywood writers, albeit with much less publicity, and seemingly less input on how a game should be made.

If you were to ask me I would tell you that it’s time to give the writers a little bit of spotlight. Even though the Richard Garriotts and Jeff Kaplans of the world might in some sense be called geniuses, they would be nothing without the modest writing crew they had behind them and they could only improve their status by adding stronger writing teams.

But that about sums up my particular thoughts for the week, so let me know if you agree disagree, even if you don’t care for story at all in your games. I just personally think that a good story can almost always save a game with poor gameplay, but it almost never works the other way around.

Until next time!