1eyedking The descriptive text in Planescape would be considered bad writing by novelists

[MajorMace]

I wish I was a self-taught free-thinking crpg genius like lurker king.

 

[Xeon]

I thought Tyranny was funded by Paradox so the editor was hired by them, no? if its true Paradox was the one funding Tyranny and not split or something.

I can't tell a good writing from a bad one, me personally I don't want to waste my time reading fluff, I normally just skip all dialogue and read the journal or scroll up and read the dialogue if there is some important choices. What I liked about PST's writing or whatever is the mystique of who the Nameless one is, if the gameplay was good, I might have given it another playthrough but I didn't enjoy the gameplay.

 

[Egosphere]

Storytelling is only a portion of writing. Writing consists of having great ideas and being able to write them into engaging prose. You can not have good writing without some combination of the two.

'Engaging prose' is a vague term. PST had engaging prose. You could say that it needed an editor to look through it, redact it where needed etc. but that does not overturn the quality of PST's writing.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

I wish I was a self-taught free-thinking crpg genius like lurker king.

Hey, I never said I'm an intellectual or writer. I'm just a regular dude. It doesn't mean I can't tell the difference between a pretentious charlatan and the real deal.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

God forbid you'd write a game that doesn't have dungeons & dragons and generic science fantasy tropes as a basis. Oh woe be the world how could that possibly be acceptable.

It is much more basic than this. Players want to interact with NPCs, explore a game world, collect items, etc. It doesn’t matter the setting you choose, you need to make a lot of concessions from a narrative standpoint to make this work.

So basically you are arguing that you can't have well written literary prose AND have all the wonderful gameplay stalwarts you've come to enjoy, and that applies to all forms of video gaming? Because in the past games haven't upheld the standard of consistent real world literary novels possess?

Did you ever play a cRPG in your whole life? cRPG gameplay is not fitting for storytelling purposes. This is self-explanatory. The moment quest design becomes a thing everything else is secondary.

My question would be, what delusion made you think that novels selling this portray all of literature?

My question would be, what delusion made you think that I care about all of literature?

Pulitzer prize tier writing doesn't mean that realism is the goal, it means that the prose has to be *well written*.

Pulitzer prize tier writing doesn't mean that is good writing either.

A narrative that isn't a shambles, written word that is incredibly well presented both technically and structurally, and a consistent level of artistic achievement throughout.

“Written word that is incredibly well presented both technically and structurally” can mean anything. Those are just empty words. Give me examples.

“Gameplay doesn't need to inform the writing, you can put the writing first and the making fun gameplay bit second and still have it work, but even if it does you can still do the writing well and in such a manner that you achieve a stunning impact.

Easier said than done.

I don't know why you'd even imagine that you need ironclad realism to have something that's well written however.

Why? Don’t you think that a fictional world needs believable characters?

You might be surprised, but human beings are pretty good at this making bullshit up gag, and conceiving a game world where all your supposed "realism breakers" are dealt with in a narratively consistent manner is perfectly possible.

Probably 99% of poorly written cRPGs are narratively consistent. So?

 

[fantadomat]

TBH, the fact that they use a variant of stir in successive sentences annoys me about that PST screen. An easy thing to fix, so I'm surprised nobody did.

Chris is very bright and creative, but I don't need to read his wikipedia page to know he has never taken a writing class in his life. His work is plagued with basic technical errors.

I totally agree with this. It was painful to go back and read the text when I was working on the enhanced edition - and also realize how many basic spelling and grammar errors there were. While I have taken writing classes (which makes this admission worse), the failure is mine, not my teachers. Torment suffered the curse of not having an editor, which wasn't even considered a "thing" by Interplay at the time - or Obsidian. I did hire one with my own money for Lonesome Road, but that was perhaps the worst DLC to ask an editor to look over.

I totally disagree with this statement. Good writing is not about spelling and punctuation...it is about engaging the reader and writing entertaining. Writing is not something to learn in a school or by listening to professors . Writing is a thing that you can't learn,eater you have it or you don't. All this retarded misconceptions is the reason why we don't have any good writers past 50 years. How many of the greatest writers did go to writers school? Did Hemingway, Tolstoy, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Livy, Shakespeare or Poe? Writing as any art can't be learned,it is about discarding the rules and expressing yourself,it is not about following what some envious little dwarf of a professor told you.

Also Torment have one of your best writing,take it as you will.

 

[Egosphere]

we don't have any good writers past 50 years.

Cormack McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Umberto Eco etc.

 

[Lilura]

Whether formally or informally, great writers studied literature and language. Maybe not too much literature or they would lack originality (reading too much is bad).

But yeah, genius is wasted without education.

Games are different. Expectations are exceedingly low.

 

[santino27]

TBH, the fact that they use a variant of stir in successive sentences annoys me about that PST screen. An easy thing to fix, so I'm surprised nobody did.

Chris is very bright and creative, but I don't need to read his wikipedia page to know he has never taken a writing class in his life. His work is plagued with basic technical errors.

I totally agree with this. It was painful to go back and read the text when I was working on the enhanced edition - and also realize how many basic spelling and grammar errors there were. While I have taken writing classes (which makes this admission worse), the failure is mine, not my teachers. Torment suffered the curse of not having an editor, which wasn't even considered a "thing" by Interplay at the time - or Obsidian. I did hire one with my own money for Lonesome Road, but that was perhaps the worst DLC to ask an editor to look over.

I totally disagree with this statement. Good writing is not about spelling and punctuation...it is about engaging the reader and writing entertaining. Writing is not something to learn in a school or by listening to professors . Writing is a thing that you can't learn,eater you have it or you don't. All this retarded misconceptions is the reason why we don't have any good writers past 50 years. How many of the greatest writers did go to writers school? Did Hemingway, Tolstoy, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Livy, Shakespeare or Poe? Writing as any art can't be learned,it is about discarding the rules and expressing yourself,it is not about following what some envious little dwarf of a professor told you.

Also Torment have one of your best writing,take it as you will.

You're conflating talent with skill. A good writer has both. All the talent in the world can still be betrayed by a lack of skill and technical mastery. All the skill in the world can still lead to clever but ultimately soulless writing if there is no talent to back it up.

Another way of putting it is that you need to know the rules of writing before you can successfully go about subverting them. Shakespeare wrote several sonnets deconstructing the idea of sonnets or responding to traditional concepts of the sonnet. He understood that knowledge of what came before was important, if only to provide as a foundation to build upon or a status quo to attack.

 

[Quillon]

You're conflating talent with skill. A good writer has both. All the talent in the world can still be betrayed by a lack of skill and technical mastery. All the skill in the world can still lead to clever but ultimately soulless writing if there is no talent to back it up.

But you need to roll good attributes before that and pick your feats cleverly or else, bust.

 

[Lilura]

So yeah, I agree with the person who started this discussion.

I have to admit, if a lack of education shows through, it disgusts me. Likewise, if someone is over-educated and lacks original thought/style.

Most game writers lack both; it's as plain as day for anyone who has eyes that can see. You can tell when someone lacks a classical education (which is coveted).

I'd go as far as to say that most esteemed game writers are plagiarists, and not even good plagiarists (history attests to there being good and bad plagiarists).

 

[fantadomat]

Whether formally or informally, great writers studied literature and language. Maybe not too much literature or they would lack originality (reading too much is bad).

But yeah, genius is wasted without education.

Games are different. Expectations are exceedingly low.

If by study literature you mean reading books,then i agree with you.

Genius can't be wasted,don't belittle the word,geniuses come by once every few hundred years. Also education is scourge to free thinkers. Most great people are self educated.

Games are different,i agree. Low expectations....well that depends on the person. Also there is such thing as taste . As a whole games are written for interactivity,you can't just write a novel in a game and expect to be good. RPGs are more closely to a combination of 50 short stories in the same world.

TBH, the fact that they use a variant of stir in successive sentences annoys me about that PST screen. An easy thing to fix, so I'm surprised nobody did.

Chris is very bright and creative, but I don't need to read his wikipedia page to know he has never taken a writing class in his life. His work is plagued with basic technical errors.

I totally agree with this. It was painful to go back and read the text when I was working on the enhanced edition - and also realize how many basic spelling and grammar errors there were. While I have taken writing classes (which makes this admission worse), the failure is mine, not my teachers. Torment suffered the curse of not having an editor, which wasn't even considered a "thing" by Interplay at the time - or Obsidian. I did hire one with my own money for Lonesome Road, but that was perhaps the worst DLC to ask an editor to look over.

I totally disagree with this statement. Good writing is not about spelling and punctuation...it is about engaging the reader and writing entertaining. Writing is not something to learn in a school or by listening to professors . Writing is a thing that you can't learn,eater you have it or you don't. All this retarded misconceptions is the reason why we don't have any good writers past 50 years. How many of the greatest writers did go to writers school? Did Hemingway, Tolstoy, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Livy, Shakespeare or Poe? Writing as any art can't be learned,it is about discarding the rules and expressing yourself,it is not about following what some envious little dwarf of a professor told you.

Also Torment have one of your best writing,take it as you will.

You're conflating talent with skill. A good writer has both. All the talent in the world can still be betrayed by a lack of skill and technical mastery. All the skill in the world can still lead to clever but ultimately soulless writing if there is no talent to back it up.

Another way of putting it is that you need to know the rules of writing before you can successfully go about subverting them. Shakespeare wrote several sonnets deconstructing the idea of sonnets or responding to traditional concepts of the sonnet. He understood that knowledge of what came before was important, if only to provide as a foundation to build upon or a status quo to attack.

Generally i agree with you,still talent is more important. Books are read by normal people not people with philology degree,majority of people don't care/know about spelling and grammar. Also skills are acquired trough experience....at least during the good old times.

 

[santino27]

Generally i agree with you,still talent is more important.

This, I agree with you on. My point was simply that you need both.

 

[fantadomat]

Generally i agree with you,still talent is more important.

This, I agree with you on. My point was simply that you need both.

Well the authors of old did have skill,but it was very unique for themself. Many of them were nobles and had home lessons,huge libraries and self thought skills. It did create a really nice combination of stylised writing.

 

[Dexter]

Video game writing could easily be on the level of literature. The difference isn't down to the fact it's video games, the difference is down to the fact voice acting has taken over the mainstream and that voice acted lines cannot hold a candle to actual prose.

Planescape is written about as well as one of the better class of genre scifi novel, it's not written as well as the best scifi novels or the best of mainstream literature.

Science fiction and fantasy do however put a lot of emphasis on settings and worldbuilding, to the point where I reckon mediocre prose are actually people's most enjoyed novels in a lot of cases, and vice versa. It's legitimately confusing for a lot of fans to talk about "good" scifi/fantasy writing.

I absolutely believe that writing in videogames can be just as good as literature. Maybe even better.

The reason why it sucks is because we settle for the lowest possible standards. Why not demand companies hire popular authors instead of idolizing people with no formal writing experience?

Video games ultimately aren't fucking books, nor are they fucking movies. Hiring either an "experienced" book writer or movie director to design a good game is stupid and having them modify their process to fit game production will likely prove frustrating. Writing and any cinematic accompaniment have to work in the context of the larger game and not get in the way of the gameplay and keeping the players attention for xx hours while they're trying to overcome some challenge. With a good book you just sit down and start reading, and it's just a different experience.

Depending on the genre and type of game, this quote also still remains very relevant till today:

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." - John Carmack

Not necessarily as valid for the specific genre of story-based CRPGs as say for some of the more successful ARPGs like Diablo or some of the more recent ones I played and liked like Victor Vran. But even with classic CRPGs that are based off of literary style and try to simulate the basics of three-act story structures with Setup, Midpoint and Climax, it is fundamentally a different process to write such an experience entirely with dialogue trees, unlockable dialogue and interactive choices based on skills, as well as multi-part quests where the player has to take actions to progress, has different choices, entirely veers off from the main story to do something else like explore a dungeon, doing some bounty quests or whatever and unless you make it a somewhat linear experience you can't plan it all out and stretch it just the way you want it.

You'll note that most of the Top50 Best-selling and most successful games of all times barely feature a story. They're either very basic games with gamified simple rules and no story to speak of (Tetris, Wii Sports, Super Mario, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Frogger, Lemmings, Terraria, The Sims), Multiplayer games (PUBG, Call of Duty, Battlefield) or large Sandboxes/Open Worlds (Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption). And with those that do feature a story, it's mostly one that accompanies the gameplay, usually with Cutscenes between missions or dialogue during gameplay that is essentially skippable, and said story doesn't get much in the way of the game part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

What this tells us is that usually when most people want to sit down and play a game (instead of reading a book or watching a movie) they actually want to mostly do just that. It's misguided to fundamentally believe differently and try to entirely shoe-horn another medium into the "game format" by hook or by crook, although it might create some interesting experiments and worthwhile experiences it'll always be a different process from writing or reading a book and gameplay should always be the most important part of the equation. The choice alone for a game to have it be full of literary prose and lengthy texts or having the story closer resembling a book will likely already limit the audience to a large degree and zero in on specific types of customers. "Games" are ultimately a different medium just to a limited extent compatible with literature. You can create a game without any sort of story based just on compelling game mechanics and have it sell over 100 million copies and you can try to shoe-horn a story into a game mould, but it will never take precedence to the quality of the gameplay and the overall player experience.

What would also help immensely would be if when they tried making a Fantasy game they didn't hire from the same pool of writers that think Tolkien is a problematic racist white man or resemble these people, because they'll inevitably produce ideological drivel:

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Dexter I don’t know about the others, but Martha Wells and JY Yang definitely deserve to be among the nominees.

 

[2house2fly]

Lol you think Tolkien's work contained no ideology?

 

[Dexter]

Dexter I don’t know about the others, but Martha Wells and JY Yang definitely deserve to be among the nominees.

Yes, I'm sure these people are there because of their... supreme writing skills...

 

[fantadomat]

Dexter I don’t know about the others, but Martha Wells and JY Yang definitely deserve to be among the nominees.

They deserve to be thrown in the mines,not nominated. Start reading real books before your brain fully rots from that shit.

 

[Egosphere]

Dexter I don’t know about the others, but Martha Wells and JY Yang definitely deserve to be among the nominees.

Yes, I'm sure these people are there because of their... supreme writing skills...

I know it's wrong to idealize the past, but every time I look at photos of western writers from, say, mid 20th century, the whole era looks so compared to the circus we live in today

 

[Whisper]

Gay& etc. diseased should be kept from indoctrinating young children with their sickness.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Who to believe:

1) hundreds of respected authors who almost universally say writing is a learned craft and that 99% of success is about relentless hard work and effort of outlining, writing, editing, rewriting, researching, reading and studying and emulating great journalists, playwrights or novelists.

2) Couple of blokes on the Codex who are literally living proof that writing cannot be learned - because they can barely construct a coherent sentence.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Yes, I'm sure these people are there because of their... supreme writing skills...

This is dumb. They're not handing out nebula nominations for diversity points. Here's the first chapter of JY Yang's story. You tell me which 2017 novella should've been nominated instead.

https://www.tor.com/2017/08/02/excerpts-jy-yang-the-black-tides-of-heaven/

Here is the first chapter of All Systems Red by Martha Wells:

https://www.tor.com/2017/04/28/excerpts-martha-wells-all-systems-red/

"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure."

Sure passes my first paragraph test.

Dexter I don’t know about the others, but Martha Wells and JY Yang definitely deserve to be among the nominees.

They deserve to be thrown in the mines,not nominated. Start reading real books before your brain fully rots from that shit.

What do you mean by real books? It's the Nebula awards--it's all going to be genre fiction. I don't see what having lady parts or gender dysphoria has to do with it.

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

Who to believe:

1) hundreds of respected authors who almost universally say writing is a learned craft and that 99% of success is about relentless hard work and effort of outlining, writing, editing, rewriting, researching, reading and studying and emulating great journalists, playwrights or novelists.

2) Couple of blokes on the Codex who are literally living proof that writing cannot be learned - because they can barely construct a coherent sentence.

Ray Bradbury
Mark Twain
H.G. Wells
Jack London
Charles Dickens
William Faulkner
Kurt Vonnegut
harper Lee
Conan Doyle
Leo Tolstoy
Nietzche

etc. The list is endless. In fact, you can consider everyone born before 1800's to have no real "Master of Arts in Literature" as in the modern sense. These people were taught Rhetorics, Grammar and Poetics in the vein of ideas established by the real classics from the ancient Greek and Roman traditions. And guess what, almost all who were educated in these times received this education irrespective of their future studies. There is something to the idea that education in modern literature might actually end up restricting talent.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Who to believe:

1) hundreds of respected authors who almost universally say writing is a learned craft and that 99% of success is about relentless hard work and effort of outlining, writing, editing, rewriting, researching, reading and studying and emulating great journalists, playwrights or novelists.

2) Couple of blokes on the Codex who are literally living proof that writing cannot be learned - because they can barely construct a coherent sentence.

Ray Bradbury
Mark Twain
H.G. Wells
Jack London
Charles Dickens
William Faulkner
Kurt Vonnegut
harper Lee
Conan Doyle
Leo Tolstoy
Nietzche

etc. The list is endless. .

Who are these people and why did you put them in a list?