RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
08-25-2013, 03:34 AM
I don’t argue the point that there is a culture problem, but I would like to dispute the notion that “a professional writer” is a cure for what ails us.
Show Content
SpoilerVideo game writing is just plain different in some ways, and many forms of it are just not conducive to the nature of fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious humor. Games involve a lot of repetition; personally, I consider cyclical patterns to be fundamental to the storytelling of games more so than a lot of theorists seem to suppose. Yet humor involves a lot of subverted expectation (which is quite possibly fundamental to what humor is, depending on the theory). These two things are not completely antithetical, to be sure, but they are also in obvious conflict.
I cannot tell you how many projects have the brilliant idea to bring on a bright-eyed acclaimed Hollywood writer absolutely convinced that this is gonna be totally awesome, we’re going to revolutionize that shitty game writing your industry pumps out. It seems that most of them come out of it a little bit older and wiser, finding it hard because it is hard even for a great writer, unless they were making the highly linear kind of story where they might as well have written a movie. So I cannot tell you; however many it’s been, it’s that many too many.
After all, if you’re trying to lay off the cutscenes like you should, you are no longer writing an experience that you can send through a studio and will go in a certain order from beginning to end in a definite amount of time, barring something unusual like Clue’s multiple endings. No, every point at which you give a player leeway to choose the ordering of actions, you have more possibilities, more orderings to things than you can possibly anticipate due to combinatorial explosion of the different game elements.* This is why humorous adventure games have a lot of “brick jokes”—it is an acknowledgement that outside of what amounts to simple dialogue and cutscenes, the player dictates the pace of the story, and trying to account for every possibility is a fool’s errand. The player doesn’t need to be smarter than you to do something you don’t have an answer for, so when you write for games, your writing tends to be a key part of the game’s design, in a way. Thus, you are not only playing at writing; you are also playing at something not unlike computer programming (and a part that many programmers find difficult, at that).
I dare say some of these writers we already have are unsung heroes and the reasons you don’t see very many of them really bring the funny or whatever is because it can be a much more complicated task at points than writing normally, and writing normally ain’t no cakewalk neither. And no matter how good a joke is, it won’t survive the onslaught of repetition that gameplay tends to bring, and if you aren’t repeating, it’s probably because what you actually wanted to make was a longer film than anyone’d sit around for. I mean, it could be that you invented an AI that can spin a good yarn, but I’d believe that when I see it.
Maybe this is getting rambly. No, it is getting rambly, and I am seconds away from nodding off here (assuming I don’t do something foolish and get a “second wind” and start playing those things I preordered that decided they’d come out the weekend before classes start). The thing is, yeah, this is an industry where many potential hires out of college have to be told, “Before you put it in the portfolio, ask yourself if someone who saw it would think you’re a serial killer as a result.” But personally, I don’t blame the market or the writers so much. I think the task is really a tall order; you are better serviced in general in games by having a humorous outlook than by outrageously good comedy.
* If in a particular timeframe you permit for ei events in each of n sequences, there are (Σei)!/Π(ei!) possible orderings, where of these events Σ means sum from i = 1 to n and Π means product over the same, and bear in mind that the timeframe is not at your command. (An example for the laity: if you had The Three Trials in your game, with three steps for each performed in order, and it lets you ping-pong between the Trials as you like, then this means there are (3+3+3)!/(3!*3!*3!)=9!/216=1680 possible orders these tasks can be done, and any writer who might, for instance, try to give a personalized touch to a large number of these individual branches in the face of such potential numbers is not being their own best friend, despite this sort of exploration being much of the fun in dialogue-heavy games). Oh, at this point I’d namedrop Virtue’s Last Reward for being a good example of taking tree-like story branching and really running with it, except I’ve never played it; but it does go to show it’s not a horrible idea, to do dialogue this way... maybe a painful one. And then there is also the other kind of combinatorial explosion that leads to “I can’t use these things together”, the war of every item against every item.
I cannot tell you how many projects have the brilliant idea to bring on a bright-eyed acclaimed Hollywood writer absolutely convinced that this is gonna be totally awesome, we’re going to revolutionize that shitty game writing your industry pumps out. It seems that most of them come out of it a little bit older and wiser, finding it hard because it is hard even for a great writer, unless they were making the highly linear kind of story where they might as well have written a movie. So I cannot tell you; however many it’s been, it’s that many too many.
After all, if you’re trying to lay off the cutscenes like you should, you are no longer writing an experience that you can send through a studio and will go in a certain order from beginning to end in a definite amount of time, barring something unusual like Clue’s multiple endings. No, every point at which you give a player leeway to choose the ordering of actions, you have more possibilities, more orderings to things than you can possibly anticipate due to combinatorial explosion of the different game elements.* This is why humorous adventure games have a lot of “brick jokes”—it is an acknowledgement that outside of what amounts to simple dialogue and cutscenes, the player dictates the pace of the story, and trying to account for every possibility is a fool’s errand. The player doesn’t need to be smarter than you to do something you don’t have an answer for, so when you write for games, your writing tends to be a key part of the game’s design, in a way. Thus, you are not only playing at writing; you are also playing at something not unlike computer programming (and a part that many programmers find difficult, at that).
I dare say some of these writers we already have are unsung heroes and the reasons you don’t see very many of them really bring the funny or whatever is because it can be a much more complicated task at points than writing normally, and writing normally ain’t no cakewalk neither. And no matter how good a joke is, it won’t survive the onslaught of repetition that gameplay tends to bring, and if you aren’t repeating, it’s probably because what you actually wanted to make was a longer film than anyone’d sit around for. I mean, it could be that you invented an AI that can spin a good yarn, but I’d believe that when I see it.
Maybe this is getting rambly. No, it is getting rambly, and I am seconds away from nodding off here (assuming I don’t do something foolish and get a “second wind” and start playing those things I preordered that decided they’d come out the weekend before classes start). The thing is, yeah, this is an industry where many potential hires out of college have to be told, “Before you put it in the portfolio, ask yourself if someone who saw it would think you’re a serial killer as a result.” But personally, I don’t blame the market or the writers so much. I think the task is really a tall order; you are better serviced in general in games by having a humorous outlook than by outrageously good comedy.
* If in a particular timeframe you permit for ei events in each of n sequences, there are (Σei)!/Π(ei!) possible orderings, where of these events Σ means sum from i = 1 to n and Π means product over the same, and bear in mind that the timeframe is not at your command. (An example for the laity: if you had The Three Trials in your game, with three steps for each performed in order, and it lets you ping-pong between the Trials as you like, then this means there are (3+3+3)!/(3!*3!*3!)=9!/216=1680 possible orders these tasks can be done, and any writer who might, for instance, try to give a personalized touch to a large number of these individual branches in the face of such potential numbers is not being their own best friend, despite this sort of exploration being much of the fun in dialogue-heavy games). Oh, at this point I’d namedrop Virtue’s Last Reward for being a good example of taking tree-like story branching and really running with it, except I’ve never played it; but it does go to show it’s not a horrible idea, to do dialogue this way... maybe a painful one. And then there is also the other kind of combinatorial explosion that leads to “I can’t use these things together”, the war of every item against every item.
sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea