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

Bohrain

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My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
I don't know how much of an indication the influences of Tyranny's writing crew are on the industry as a whole, but I have a feeling Megan Stark's interests in Hollywood blockbusters and AAA games (which seek to imitate Hollywood blockbusters in terms of methods and form of storytelling) aren't exactly uncommon. It worries me since it could be a telltale sign of a somewhat incestuous source of influence since, instead of mixing something new to the formula they end up doing minor variations to the old cliché's and tropes thinking this is the smartest shit ever, when they haven't even heard about the Taiping rebellion or how Yossarian is stuck flying that plane.
Personally I doubt the drop of quality of education as a reason for substandard writing, since I don't see any degree making anyone a good writer. It's ultimately a skill that comes from voluntary investment on reading fiction, nonfiction and practicing writing itself.
 

felipepepe

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Found particularly interesting the section in which Darth Roxor suggests the utilization of different fonts and graphics features, inspired by comic books and things like that.
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!

Meanwhile we get 20 articles of Obsidian masturbating to its glorious idea of "exploring the medium" by adding mouse-over to text - even when Morrowind already had hyperlinks 15 years ago. That's how little thought there's on using the medium. The sad truth is that most games are much closer to interactive movies like The Order: 1886 than to clever stuff like Undertale.
 

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I still need to play Undertale. Maybe I could check for it, even if I don't find the aestethic much appealing.
 

MRY

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Roxor's Torment stuff touches upon a particular bugaboo of mine, which is writing that has only implicit meaning. (I realize that some of those literature-degreed university types could lecture me about semiotics and so forth, but please don't, I was too dumb then and I'm dumber now, you'll never be able to help me.)

Roxor shoots at an easy target, which is metaphorical language where the subject of the metaphor (or is it the object?) is equally outside the reader's experience. (The best use of a metaphor is X, which you might not fully be able to appreciate, is like Y, which you are fully able to appreciate. It's even better when this reveals some connection between X and Y that spawns Y.1, Y.2, Y.3 illuminating qualities X.1, X.2, X.3, etc.) "He grinned like a bragathac before it oviposits its brood" or whatever is not really a metaphor at all because the reader has no idea what Y is. But Y has implicit meaning; you get what the writer is trying to say but that's because the metaphor is so trite and sign-posted. It is also totally non-concrete. It really reads as two separate thoughts: "He grinned like [something that grins sadistically]. In this setting, bragathacs grin sadistically and lay eggs in people (probably?)." The metaphor is doing work, but not metaphorical work.

Anyway, the thing that has struck me in reading a lot of pastoral writing, a lot of Westerns (which might be a subset of pastoral writing), and generally in reading older books is that this issue arises outside of metaphorical language.

Here's an MRY attempt at such a pasage:
On a hillock above the salt pan was a stand of live oak in whose shade the windswept rushes could be more heard than seen. The rider ceased from stropping his razor and regarded the scene with bemusement in his eyes.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure how big a hillock is, or what a salt pan is, or a live oak, or even a "stand" of trees, or what sound rushes actually make when they're blowing, or what it means to "strop" a razor, and 9/10 readers will take "bemusement" to mean "ironical amusement" as opposed to perplexity or preoccupation, and anyway I'm not actually what it means for that to be "in his eyes" -- like, I can't actually picture what eyes look like when they are ironically amused (maybe twinkling?) or perplexity (maybe narrowed?). The entire paragraph could just read, "The cowboy saw typical western stuff, while doing typical western stuff, and had a cowboyish reaction." Like the fake metaphor, this kind of writing purports to be conveying concrete information to the reader, but I have to imagine I'm not alone among readers in having no idea what is actually being described.

Incidentally, the inspiration for it is the line from Shutter Island: "No way she could get there. The bases of those cliffs are covered in poison ivy, live oak, sumac, a thousand plants with thorns as big as my dick."

While I think Cormac McCarthy is probably describing things he knows when he writes about them in, say, Blood Meridian, I am suspicious of such descriptions in most contemporary literature because I strongly suspect they are just guess work: "Here are some words I've seen associated with the thing I'm talking about, so now I'm going to use those words to show that I know about the thing I'm talking about, even though I don't."

While the fake metaphor is necessarily devoid of primary meaning, the concrete description can be authentic. And where it's authentic, it is hard to fault it -- such details are the only connection we have to the vast storehouse of human knowledge that we've thrown away by becoming urbanized and mechanized and packaged to such a degree that people are hard pressed to identify five different kinds of trees, or a cut of meat, or five constellations, etc. But the ersatz stuff is the worst because unlike the fake metaphor which is just empty, the ersatz concrete writing actually misinforms the reader. In my passage above, I could've substituted "jacaranda" for "live oak" and probably no one would've noticed, though I'm not sure jacarandas could even grow near a salt pan (hillock or otherwise).
 

evdk

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Codex 2012 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It’s like the whole video game world is made up of incompetents, narcissists, sell-outs and conmen.
Zz2SVbX.png


*coug* *cough* sorry I meant
rz-UUqQX.jpeg
 
Self-Ejected

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Meanwhile we get 20 articles of Obsidian masturbating to its glorious idea of "exploring the medium" by adding mouse-over to text - even when Morrowind already had hyperlinks 15 years ago. That's how little thought there's on using the medium. The sad truth is that most games are much closer to interactive movies like The Order: 1886 than to clever stuff like Undertale.

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.

c6dd23f8f1054c644134698b1ac0fe0e.jpg
 

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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.

c6dd23f8f1054c644134698b1ac0fe0e.jpg
Duchamp could have been such a great codexian quality poster, men.
 

Dorateen

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Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
 

SausageInYourFace

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
On a hillock above the salt pan was a stand of live oak in whose shade the windswept rushes could be more heard than seen.

I'm curious, is there a particular reason that sentence is so long and wavy? Cause thats a lot of information in there for a reader to comprehend ("On A above B there is a C and in the C's D is E - and not F"). So, personally, I would've split that in two, like so:

"On a hillock above the salt pan was a stand of live oak. In its shade the windswept rushes could be more heard than seen."
 

evdk

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Codex 2012 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dunno, do you want to make money?
 

MRY

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I've been reading a lot of run-on-sentence pastoral descriptions lately, I guess. :)
 

MRY

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Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dunno, do you want to make money?
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.
 

Dorateen

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Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dunno, do you want to make money?

Indeed. So we can add prostitutes to the list of incompetents, narcissists, sell-outs and conmen that characterize game development.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dunno, do you want to make money?
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.

! It isn't! It's an unusual thing to say because Baldur's Gate is considered rather non-epic by subsequent standards. So maybe Black Isle had an effect after all. Somebody should ask Feargus about that.
 
Last edited:

MRY

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Huh. Yeah, I believe it was the doctors who mentioned it to me during my interview. I was so sleep deprived and delirious during that interview, though, that it is not impossible that I'm mixing up who told me what, or even the content of what they told me. But I am fairly certain that what was described to me was that they rejected the non-epic suggestion based on the (correct) supposition that having a world-changing protagonist on an epic quest would be more appealing. It certainly was never indicated that this was some kind of secret -- I took it to be the kind of thing that would be in a dozen retrospectives about the game.,

Incidentally, this was the same conversation in which they mentioned wanting to improve facial animation and voice over, as I mentioned in a prior thread, which takes on an interesting salience given Roxor's article and your preface to it: in some ways, the move toward cinematic dialogues in Mass Effect and (to a lesser extent) Dragon Age: Origins is a way of addressing the "use of the medium" problem.
 

evdk

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Codex 2012 Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dunno, do you want to make money?
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.

! It isn't! It's an unusual thing to say because Baldur's Gate is considered rather non-epic by subsequent standards. So maybe Black Isle had an effect after all. Somebody should ask Feargus about that.
Somebody should ask Faergus about self loathing. Doesn't mean it's actually gonna happen.
 

alphyna

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What an awesome article rant. Personally, I've found the arguements in part 2 a bit wonky, but parts 1 and 3 are awesome and I agree with most points (even if sometimes it does feel a bit as though the author is just tailoring his arguments to his personal tastes).

I have my doubts whether the writers at inXile profess the same writing ability as Tolstoy
Just a heads-up: Tolstoy was a very smart man who had a lot of great and important ideas, but his writing ability—i.e. the ability to put actual words into actual sentences to convey said ideas—is widely regarded as atrocious here in Russia. (And not by lazy ninth-graders, but by mature philologists as well.)

Also, you're talking about how cinematic games are better equipped to tell stories than the ones that try to go after a bookish feel (true), but why not take it even further? 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). I think this is generally what gaming storytelling is supposed to aim at—although turning to movies is definitely a step in the right direction.
 

Fry

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I managed to skim it.

- Some bad prose was appropriately and deservedly highlighted.
- Very quickly got bored of what amounted to bitching about "ivory tower elites" or the vague equivalent. Yes, we get it. Them durn modern intellekchuls is bad, etc. Back when men were men, they knew how to draw sweeping conclusions from scant evidence and write very entertaining (but probably wrong) analyses of ancient cultures.
- Bitching about "stage direction" and text descriptions of facial expressions and emotional states in isometric games... and then effectively saying the only way around this is full voice acting in first person? Well... yeah. No shit. Budgets, eh?

I gave up after that. Some day, when I'm truly bored or particularly suicidal, I'll read it in its entirety.
 

Glaucon

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alphyna

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Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?
Dragon Age 2 is a relatively high-budget and relatively new game in a well-known franchise that was exactly about that—a ragtag team lead by a nobody making their way and name in the world. As we all know, it was accepted so well that I don't think Bioware will make the same mistake ever again.
 

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