Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Darth Roxor on the State of RPG Writing

[Cool name]

You may go like Roxor and initially think this is "just being meta", but how many games do this? Bloodlines with fonts, MGS2 with Pyscho Mantis... and that's it?

Bloodlines with fonts, MGS2 with Pyscho Mantis... and that's it?

MGS2 with Pyscho Mantis

oh p decent article btw darth roxor

 

[Ludo Lense]

Personally, I believe that the series that does it best is (sigh) Dark Souls. You get some bits of dialogue and cutscenes, but most characters express themselves through environmental design and actual encounters (fighting styles, animations, etc).

There is a limit to how much this style of context can achieve. Note that the themes in the Souls games are powerful but simple.

 

[alphyna]

Personally, I believe that the series that does it best is (sigh) Dark Souls. You get some bits of dialogue and cutscenes, but most characters express themselves through environmental design and actual encounters (fighting styles, animations, etc).

There is a limit to how much this style of context can achieve. Note that the themes in the Souls games are powerful but simple.

Oh, I agree completely.

Whereas most RPGs are like novels, I take the Souls series as poetry (strong imagery loosely connected by archetype-based plots at best and simply being expressionist at its least coherent). The thing is, recently I've come to believe that games as a medium are actually generally better at being poems than at being novels, the feeling reinforced by many non-RPG titles that explore that area. The thing that games do best is creating scapes, either artistic (art design, mood, sense of place and immersion) or logical (rulesets, combat). Neither thrives when you throw a novel-style story on top of that. Or at least I don't think many developers have found a way to make them thrive.

(As with any rule, there are, of course, exceptions; not saying there aren't.)

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

The lore-related criticism is quite apt, but I don't know that this is an RPG problem alone. I've seen the same criticism made within fantasy literature discussions as well. It usually takes the form of "Tolkien was steeped in mythology, language and literature of medieval cultures, while the succeeding writers were steeped in Tolkien".

This is really where I think Undertale shines - forget the furry drama, the game is a master-class in using the medium.

Stuff like using different fonts, having a villain that literally erase your save file and make the game crash to desktop, in-game characters acknowledging multiple playthroughs, the tutorial lying about the game, the UI being used in some battles, etc...

You may go like Roxor and initially think this is "just being meta", but how many games do this? Bloodlines with fonts, MGS2 with Pyscho Mantis... and that's it? FFS, the way it uses sounds & music to give each character a voice I only remember seeing in Star Control, more than 25 years ago!

Nier is pretty good on this front. In addition to the god-tier trolling with the endings, the game jumps from genre to genre rather playfully.

 

[Excidium II]

I endorse this article,

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Yeah, needs to be a longer article.

And really writers ought to sit with designers, coders, the rest of the dev team and work more in concert with them rather than in isolation.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Show dont tell, tell but tell little, some style, buts its actually substance.

Thats why Form Soft games are good.

Underrail did this well, I still finished the game with all kinds of crazy theories about its world.

 

[karoliner]

I was expecting shit but it turned out to be a very good read,thanks for doing it Roxor. I would like it to be read by as much RPG developers as posible but they don't seem to care about good writing as long as their kickstarters continue to be successful.

 

[Black Angel]

So your alternative to retarded pretentious cRPGs are pretentious ready-mades with RPG-maker-jRPG-looks? Your false dilema is really depressing, Felipepepe. Please, don't tell me you really believe in this.

I think you kind of missed felipe's point there, man. I mean, have you tried the game?

If a game with as low budget and pretentious as Undertale can do it, why not other games (and especially this so-called Kickstarter RPGs of 'Renaissance' era)? Undertale expanded upon old JRPGs way of conveying characters's 'voice' by giving different characters different 'voice' and, in some cases, different font. As suggested by Darth Roxor, this utilization of different fonts and graphics features (and clever use of audio) might help with presenting the narratives in a way that won't hinder the gameplay (as in the case of Undertale).

In no way this means felipe (or even me) suggesting we should have more Undertale (like you seem to thought with that post), but developers of our beloved pretentious western cRPGs should learn a thing or two from how Undertale, with all of its pretentiousness, utilize different fonts and graphics features (AND maybe even creatively design appropriate audio for different characters, not just different situation and/or different areas/city/hubs), as to not how writings and narrative getting the way of gameplay.

 

[Goral]

(...) These people didn’t have to take part in deadweight nonsense the likes of gender studies. (...)

I might as well have stopped reading at this point, 10/10.

Very good article which no major gaming site would publish in such a form.

Edit:

There is one obvious way that the purple prose and general nonsense could be fought - most of it could be quickly and easily fished out by a competent editor, and by that, I mean a real editor worth his salt, and not the dozen writers all reading each other’s works and commenting upon them in a rotten display of pseudo-peer review, or a bunch of QA people looking for typos. Unfortunately, the art of real edition has either been forsaken long ago or never even introduced into the big games industry. We can only wonder as to why – perhaps it’s because the writers are prima donnas who can’t accept too much criticism. Perhaps it’s because the workload would be too big for a single editor, raising the need for multiple ones, which would up development costs. Or maybe there’s just a lack of manpower on the market.

Brother None TimCain Chris Avellone
In case you haven't noticed Darth Roxor is looking for a job but he needs American wages not Polish.

 

[Ninjerk]

I'm sure this is common knowledge, but I recall the Bioware guys bragging to me about how Black Isle people had told them that Baldur's Gate should be about low-level heroes try to help a small town survive through a hard winter (facing bandits and stuff like that), and how the game's success proved that epic was the way to go.

Chris Avellone, get the cross.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Prime Junta]

Huh, I wouldn't have expected Roxor of all people to advocate the J.E. Sawyer school of game writing.

Overall, I'm in strong agreement. The points about loredumps, excessive wordiness, poor editing, and purple prose are spot-on. Ironically, the article itself suffers from some of the same faults – a good editor would've snipped the rant about creative writers and English majors ruining everything; it's a digression which adds nothing and distracts from the meat of the text.

One area where I possibly disagree has to do with worldbuilding. A well thought-out, coherent, and deep world where the authors have at least cursorily thought about what the cows eat does make a big difference. Game worlds are too often just arbitrarily thrown together with no sense of the underlying structures, history, or logic. That'll give us banalshitboring Forgotten Realms, whatever the trappings – case in point, Mass Effect. Games need to pay more attention to worldbuilding, not less, and when they rise above the very low bar set by the state of the industry, they deserve to be commended for it. Being historically accurate is of no importance at all, unless a game sets out to be historically accurate: what matters is internal consistency. Tyranny was a cut above the norm in this respect: it took a premise – demigods walking the Earth – and made an honest effort at exploring the consequences. It was Bronze Age inspired, in the same way and to the same extent that Forgotten Realms is medieval-inspired, or Pillars is Renaissance-inspired; not an attempt at transposing Mycenean society into a fantasy setting.

The problem isn't with the worldbuilding, it's with the exposition of the worldbuilding. Loredumps are bad. Putting the lore into books you can find or a gamepedia you can explore if you're interested is... okay, mostly because it gives the writers a place to put all that lore instead of waving it at the player at every opportunity. The point of the worldbuilding is to anchor everything that's in the world. The visual designs must emerge from it: artefacts and buildings were created at some time, by some culture present in the world. The characters you meet must live in it: they wear a certain kind of dress, speak in a certain way, live in certain kinds of household arrangements which might not always be the bourgeois nuclear family invented in the 19th century, villages, cities, states, and empires have people performing certain functions – alderman, medicine man, sheriff, sbire, knight-captain, mayor, guardsman etc. – and you will naturally come to interact with them. Working out who these people are, what their relationships to other people are, how they spend their days, what they eat, where they get their food, where the spices they use to season it come from and so on and so forth: that's lore. You don't have to explain that pepper comes from the East Indies by means of a state-run militarised trading company; if it does and your city has a harbour, it'll have a few grand ocean-going trade vessels, a pepper warehouse, rich merchants, and shops selling the stuff. If you've done your worldbuilding properly, you will naturally populate your locations accordingly and anchor your story, characters, quests, and so on in the same. Once again, Tyranny does manage this much better than most contemporary games.

In other words, while the points Roxor makes start out good, the impact is diluted when his personal dislike of certain games rears up its head again, and he starts forcing the games to fit the criticisms he's making, rather than having his criticism proceed from the games. A part of informed criticism is also to give credit where credit is due, and that, Roxor still needs to learn.

 

[commie]

ITT people theorize about why there is no good writing in computer games and offer solutions.

 

[Darth Roxor]

harro

that is certainly much discussion

rest assured i shall reply to it Soon (tm)

 

[Prime Junta]

can't come up with a single original story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

 

[Carrion]

It's an excellent article, and I agree on pretty much all of the major points.

I'll point out that the term "show, don't tell" is used in a rather literal sense in the article. Not that it's necessarily wrong, as games are a visual medium after all, but it's a technique that applies to pretty much all kinds of texts, non-visual ones included. You can very well "show" things through dialogue, which definitely holds true for something like the conversation with Ravel. In fact, one of the advantages of "telling" instead of "showing" is that it generally requires far fewer words and allows you to cut to the important parts of the story much more effectively.

Some of the criticized games seem like they actually try to "show" you things — for example, you might get these long-winded but ultimately pointless descriptions on how a character acts in a conversation, which are meant to indirectly convey information about them or the world around them, but it's overdone to a point where it breaks up the flow of the dialogue and results in the important details getting lost under all the fluff. On the other hand you also get these frequent "tell me about X" exposition dumps, increasingly often combined with a separate Lore screen (as mentioned by Roxor), which is "telling" in its most basic and unimaginative sense. In a way the current trend of cRPG writing is bringing out the worst sides of both "showing" and "telling", combining the time-consuming nature of the former and the heavy-handedness of the latter.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'll point out that the term "show, don't tell" is used in a rather literal sense in the article. Not that it's necessarily wrong, as games are a visual medium after all, but it's a technique that applies to pretty much all kinds of texts, non-visual ones included. You can very well "show" things through dialogue, which definitely holds true for something like the conversation with Ravel.

Very important point. The dialogues with Kreia that Roxor (justly) praised are a prime example. Never once does Kreia tell you something. She always shows. This is in fact one of MCA's biggest strengths as a writer -- he can communicate complex thoughts in oblique ways, giving you that feeling of insight when you grok something.

 

[Grunker]

Agree with Junta - most of the article is spot on. It gets tedious when you just grind your personal axe, though, Roxor, which is sort of your weakness at this point. You have many good insights into RPG design but are hampered by general bitternesss and personal grievances. Though I suppose you would not be a codexer were that not the case.

 

[SCO]

Ain't reading this.

 

[Ismaul]

Putting the lore into books you can find or a gamepedia you can explore if you're interested is... okay, mostly because it gives the writers a place to put all that lore instead of waving it at the player at every opportunity.

It's not really ok though. Optional lore dumps are better than forced lore dumps, but lore dumps are still shit.

Stuffing lore into books like Bethesda loves to do shows that the designers have no clue how to integrate it into the setting, gameplay, and story moments. It makes it useless, creating a disconnect between the lore and the gameplay. And it reads like fanfiction.


I agree though that worldbuilding, to the extent that it is included in the gameplay, shown in the game, and relevant to the story and themes, isn't the problem. But what cows eat usually is of no consequence to gameplay, unless showing it in the game sets the tone of the setting (they mutated and started eating meat/humans), or pertains to the story (there is a food shortage that creates a crisis that gives context to what you do in the game).

 

[Prime Junta]

It's not really ok though. Optional lore dumps are better than forced lore dumps, but lore dumps are still shit.

Stuffing lore into books like Bethesda loves to do shows that the designers have no clue how to integrate it into the setting, gameplay, and story moments. It makes it useless, creating a disconnect between the lore and the gameplay. And it reads like fanfiction.

I disagree. Even if you have a world where the lore is excellently integrated (The Witchers for example), you can still have books and 'pedias and what have you. They won't add much for most people, but there will be a few hardcore fans who want to mine every last drop of information about it, and for people who aren't interested, they won't do any harm (unless you make like BioWare and add an XP bonus to "reading" them, which turns them into another dumbass Skinner box mechanic).

Mostly though, they help the writers: if they didn't have the books to put them into, they'd be shoehorning it into dialogues.

As to the cows, I disagree again. Suppose you have a Viking-style Northern setting. If you know that in the summer the cows graze freely in fields and woods near the villages, and in the winter they're kept in stables and fed hay that was grown specifically for the purpose, then your cows will be roaming around freely with kids with branches keeping them from wandering too far off, your forests will be open and have little undergrowth, you'll have fenced-out fields of tall hay in the summer, bales of hay in the autumn, barns to keep the hay in for the winter, and stables. They'll be there, as the background for shit happening.

Conversely, if you don't figure all that out and just stick some cows somewhere with no consideration for the rest of it, your village and the surrounding countryside will feel less real and lived-in, a Potemkin village rather than a real one. It'll feel shallow, unsatisfying, and artificial, even if only a hayseed will be able to point out specifically what you did wrong.

Edit: esprit d'escalier

Furthermore: once you've figured out what cows eat, you get possibilities for stuff that directly affects gameplay. Do we have free peasants owning their own cows? Are they owned by the village collectively? Are they property of a feudal lord and the villagers just take care of them for him? And... why would somebody want to burn somebody else's barn? What would the consequences be? Without hay, the cows will starve over the winter, and they would have to be slaughtered, which means ruin, whether it's for a peasant, a village, or a lord. You could have a whole series of quests around barn-burning: perhaps you'll be doing the burning, or catching the firebug, or trying to break a vicious cycle of barn-burning between hostile villages, threatening to plunge the entire region into famine. All this from figuring out what cows eat.

 

[an Administrator]

The characters you meet must live in it: they wear a certain kind of dress, speak in a certain way, live in certain kinds of household arrangements which might not always be the bourgeois nuclear family invented in the 19th century, villages, cities, states, and empires have people performing certain functions – alderman, medicine man, sheriff, sbire, knight-captain, mayor, guardsman etc. – and you will naturally come to interact with them. Working out who these people are, what their relationships to other people are, how they spend their days, what they eat, where they get their food, where the spices they use to season it come from and so on and so forth: that's lore

TITS got it right i guess. You don't really need to emphasis so much on random NPCs, just give them one or two unique lines and it does the job.

Spoiler

 

[Ismaul]

I disagree. Even if you have a world where the lore is excellently integrated (The Witchers for example), you can still have books and 'pedias and what have you. They won't add much for most people, but there will be a few hardcore fans who want to mine every last drop of information about it, and for people who aren't interested, they won't do any harm (unless you make like BioWare and add an XP bonus to "reading" them, which turns them into another dumbass Skinner box mechanic).

Mostly though, they help the writers: if they didn't have the books to put them into, they'd be shoehorning it into dialogues.

If the lore is already well integrated, sure you could still have more optional lore. But then you could make the argument that, if there's more lore, why not integrate it in the game itself? And if it's not worth doing so, then maybe ask yourself why should it be there at all? This is the value of editing, not wasting the player's time. Saying that the writers need some place to lore dump otherwise they'll dump it in our faces really makes me think that what they need is an editor.

Also, less is more, imagination and filling the blanks and shit. If a player is hooked to the game/lore, let him imagine, let him create, let him fanfic even, instead of viewing him as a content-consumer that needs to be satisfied and must be force-fed his lunch. Mystery and incomplete lore > alll nice and tied-up setting. Hinting at more > having all the answers.


I get your point about the cows. But still, my point is that worldbuilding efforts should be put into what will be pertinent to gameplay in priority. Lack of accuracy about cows and their food won't be a problem for most settings/games, especially if there is no in-game presence of cows or if it's stylised. Most game towns for example really aren't accurate -- too small, just the most important buildings -- but they're make believe enough as the game cares not to simulate that aspect, it's not pertinent for it. It needs only basic believability, and our minds to fill the blanks, yet again. Moreover, thinking about seasons and their impact on the way cows are fed really is useless if you don't have seasons as a gameplay mechanic or motivator to action in the game. In a game where the simulation is pertinent though, like a civilisation where farming/herding is central, such as the northern setting you're talking about, then sure, simulate them cows.

 

[laclongquan]

What the fuck is this shit I dont even

What kind of mention about Journals that doesnt even mention both Planescape Torment and Arcanum?

PST journal, both in the form of quest-log, or as the form of real game world items left behind, are stuff of legendary quality.

Arcanum journal in the form of quest-log is pretty good. Actually, that's my understated analysis. The usual form of praise should be "great. 10/10"



EDIT: Darth Roxor I demand answers! Or at least acknowledgement.