lo posted:i think most game writing is bad for probably similar reasons that most contemporary genre fiction is bad: the people that write it only read stuff from their own area of work(sci fi, or videogames) and there has been this kind of insular loop where everything becomes stupider and more self referential as new writers in these areas are only ever reading the previous generation of writers in the same areas rather than reading broadly.
sounds feasible, but i'm not wondering why most video game writing is bad.
i'm wondering why there seems to be such a low bar for treating a given example of video game writing as exceptionally good, lower than genre fiction or genre movies or genre TV even. like, "wow this is good writing" seems to be a way lower bar to clear for video game scripts, comparable to "decent enough, cliche and predictable but can't complain too much" in other media.
Edited by cars ()
cars posted:there is also the Roger Ebert explanation, which is that writing in video games will always be bad because something can't be art if a dramatic or even comedic narrative can be interrupted by you, the consumer, slamming the protagonist's face into a wall 69 times because, for instance, you suck at the video game. Like, there is interactive art, but it contains its possibilities as part of the piece and will be judged on that, while the judgment of a video game's story is usually governed by elements treated by the project as divorced from interactivity, cut-scenes or events during play the player is supposed to be barred from affecting, and players can always affect them anyway by failing to progress until all tension or timing is lost. You can pause a movie but you're usually not "supposed" to by the convention under which it's an art form. You also usually can't make the movie's POV character go fishing for 18 hours straight in real time right before the climax.
I don't know if there's a good argument against that yet, but I think one of the reasons Silent Hill 2's story is still so far above most video games despite some crappy dialog is because it came from a time when designers couldn't put something behind every door in a realistic-looking apartment building, and they designed a game where most players will start to feel a little bit of relief when they can't open a door and their progress is interrupted. Like, there's one very famous old-school adventure-game puzzle in Silent Hill that grinds a lot of players to a halt for hours trying to find the solution if they don't want to look it up online, but when they solve it, it leads to one of the game's most effective deliveries of, Yeah it's rewarding when you make progress but that wasn't exactly confetti and balloons in that room was it.
we therefore require the noble Lets Player to complete the piece
cars posted:there is also the Roger Ebert explanation, which is that writing in video games will always be bad because something can't be art if a dramatic or even comedic narrative can be interrupted by you, the consumer, slamming the protagonist's face into a wall 69 times because, for instance, you suck at the video game. Like, there is interactive art, but it contains its possibilities as part of the piece and will be judged on that, while the judgment of a video game's story is usually governed by elements treated by the project as divorced from interactivity, cut-scenes or events during play the player is supposed to be barred from affecting, and players can always affect them anyway by failing to progress until all tension or timing is lost. You can pause a movie but you're usually not "supposed" to by the convention under which it's an art form. You also usually can't make the movie's POV character go fishing for 18 hours straight in real time right before the climax.
I don't know if there's a good argument against that yet, but I think one of the reasons Silent Hill 2's story is still so far above most video games despite some crappy dialog is because it came from a time when designers couldn't put something behind every door in a realistic-looking apartment building, and they designed a game where most players will start to feel a little bit of relief when they can't open a door and their progress is interrupted. Like, there's one very famous old-school adventure-game puzzle in Silent Hill that grinds a lot of players to a halt for hours trying to find the solution if they don't want to look it up online, but when they solve it, it leads to one of the game's most effective deliveries of, Yeah it's rewarding when you make progress but that wasn't exactly confetti and balloons in that room was it.
we therefore require the noble Lets Player to complete the piece
3:07:51
c_man posted:I think almost all video game writing is bad becuase each game has to sell tens of millions of copies to people who hate writing. The target audience of almost every video game are the kind of people who consider tragic endings or even the protagonist being defeated by a challenge as bad writing. That is to say, i think that games writing is bad for the same reason that most successful writing is bad, because its highly targeted at people who really like it with the knowledge that lots of people who dont care that much will go thru it in spite of it.
I mean, sure, but again, is the question, "Why is most video game writing bad?" at all interesting? Most writing in every medium is bad.
What's interesting to me is a different question: why what's considered "good" video game writing is so much worse than what's considered "good" writing in most other media, media where the average quality of writing is just as bad as the writing in video games.
cars posted:What's interesting to me is a different question: why what's considered "good" video game writing is so much worse than what's considered "good" writing in most other media, media where the average quality of writing is just as bad as the writing in video games.
there's a few factors contributing to the incredibly low standards:
1) the audience. Game's has not yet grown out of being identified, from within and without, with the manchild Gamer stereotype, and that has a lot to do with the fact that they're still a sizeable portion of the audience, and easily the most vocal. such people violently reject good writing (i.e. anything with nuance, requiring critical engagement) as an SJW mind control plot.
2) the unique quirk that it is an interactive medium. the more engaging a game is in its interactivity, the Gooder it is; conversely, the harder it is to accomodate traditional storytelling in much depth. it is significantly harder to write a good story with more than a couple of branches.
3) it is not a medium that lends itself well to the work of auters. the ones that do flourish are those whose ideas are terrible enough to be embraced by the aforementioned Terrible Gamer Audience in terms of sales and therefore industry backing (i.e. David Cage)
4) Gameing being a relatively new medium, Game's Criticism is in its infancy, with 99.9% of critics being actual tiny babbys with a very small number of good words and concepts to employ in the service of Gameing Thought.
5) video games are for children
(1) might lead to part of the explanation if the reasons why were investigated.
The rest, I'm not so sure.
What I'm doing here is drawing a comparison to, say, movies.
Compare the 40-odd-year history of video games, and the 20-year history of video games expected to have engaging stories, to a similar timeline for movies.
Good writing in cinema had matured to a point above and beyond that of video games now long before then in the medium's own maturation, before movies even had audio dialog. Movies were, at one point early in their development, considered nothing more than shallow oddities, interesting light shows that could not tell stories in the same way as prose or stage plays. They moved past that point very quickly.
Video games long ago passed that point themselves, and jokes aside, the industry, from small independent games to big industry titles, now depends on adult audiences.
Video games are not really in their infancy anymore, and neither is video game criticism.
But: they've retained a low bar for quality into a state of relative maturity.
"Good" video game writing has not developed in the same way as it did for, say, movies. And that's odd to me.
i think your anticipation w.r.t vr is wrong too, vr has been an established medium for years and there hasn't been a single title yet that has stood out in any notable quality beyond its own niche field. maybe that new half-life game might change things but so far it's just been pure novelty, tech demos and fodder for streamers to yell at. i don't see that changing anytime soon unless someone by stroke of genius figures out an intuitive & accessible approach to the gameplay
i don't really think advances in graphics or physics engines capture the collective imagination anymore. i think even AAA titles have ceased presenting advances in technical presentation as a selling point (or at least this was the case until recently with increasing adoption of ray tracing). obviously major titles are expected to keep up with contemporary standards but i don't think anyone really cares about the increasingly granular incremental improvements between CoD titles anymore, besides the particularly obsessive
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
kamelred posted:
kamelred posted:man with detailed knowledge of every single episode of the bad star trek: whats the deal with games writing?
look at this guy who thinks there's a "bad" and a "good" star trek
blinkandwheeze posted:at that point in film auterism had been pretty firmly established and was becoming the dominant mode if not there already, whereas it's still a very novel outlier in games
I'm not so sure it is. Hideo Kojima is widely recognized. The Silent Hill games were famously Toyama's in Japan, with "Team Silent" acting as a cipher for his direction in the West, and after that, Yamaoka filled the same spot as producer/composer. David Cage games may be bad but there's a long history of them at this point, and a lot of shock-high-selling indie games are auteur work by any definition.
cars posted:a good teaching moment,
its not
tears posted:video games and star trek
: things better than your posting
cars posted:I'm not so sure it is. Hideo Kojima is widely recognized. The Silent Hill games were famously Toyama's in Japan, with "Team Silent" acting as a cipher for his direction in the West, and after that, Yamaoka filled the same spot as producer/composer. David Cage games may be bad but there's a long history of them at this point, and a lot of shock-high-selling indie games are auteur work by any definition.
I mean i think you're largely just listing a the small number of people who are novel because they are exceptional in that respect. someone like david cage seems to be able to continue at higher levels of development, despite a lack of talent, entirely because there are no other competitors. and of course it's commonplace in indie development but that's what i mean -- there's nothing like a lubitsch or howard hawks or whatever of video games, it's generally something that exists exclusively outside of development at a major scale.
Video games are for the win