Why Is Game Writing So Terrible? (2021)

I think the bad writing, especially for AAA games is an industry brand&#x2F;growth problem.<p>How many more people would play video games now if they could really see them as non-linear interactive Scorsese movies instead of more akin to the plots their kids are watching in cartoons?<p>Also -- maybe there&#x27;s some problem with how we think about traditional stories&#x2F;writing where the author fully guides the reader and interactive experiences like video games.<p>The best video game stories I have as an avid lifelong gamer are from the emergent story games like Dwarf Fortress Rimworld caves of qud, kenshi, etc where I really feel ownership of the story and its not the same as everyone else&#x27;s story who played the same game.<p>If the story quality in an 50 hour more story driven video game was higher though, I might still devote time to do that stuff these days, but as it is I almost never play story driven games except a few indie titles a year.

Game writing in particular is particularly hard because games are interactive.<p>In a movie or a novel, the authors have full control of the story, every choice the characters do can be set to best advance the story, to create dramatic tension, etc... Same thing for how skilled the character is, the outcome of fights, etc...<p>In a game, at least some aspects are decided by player actions, all of them need to be taken into account. So authors essentially needs to write much more than it is seen, and some of them may be hard to make exciting. Of course, games use all sorts of tricks to give the illusion of choice so that the story is going the way the authors want while at the same time the player thinks he is doing something. But it also adds to difficulty.<p>And not only that, when you are reading a book, you are expected to read, when watching a movie, you are expected to sit down and watch, but when playing a game, especially an action game, you are supposed to play, and reading lots of text and watching long cutscenes is annoying to many players. So you have to either integrate the story to the action or pack a lot of information in as little as possible dialogue or short cutscenes. Again, it adds to the difficulty of story writing.<p>Several solutions here. Either you go the visual novel route. Some are games in name only, where the player has effectively no agency. And unsurprisingly, with that pesky player out of the way, the good ones make for the best stories. Some games focus on agency, making your choices matter, but often the story and other aspects of the game are limited. It can also result in really expensive games, which matters because when you are making an expensive game, you have investors who want a return on their investment, and you usually have to play it safe and can&#x27;t really try wild ideas that may fail commercially. And there is the &quot;Doom&quot; approach, where there is a &quot;story&quot;, but it is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible not to distract from the main objective of the game, that is shooting stuff.

Has it ever been good across the industry? I&#x27;m not a big gamer but have been playing lots of retro games lately, including old text adventures, and most of it reads like really terrible fan fiction. Back when CD drives were still new tech, there were many experimental attempts at creating interactive games that were more story telling of the &quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&quot; type than video games with a unifying plot. Not that most of those stories were great but it did seem like for them it was story first, perhaps because the tech was still primitive enough that the story had to make up for it.

A lot of well-written, high-budget games are detested by the gaming community because the themes or conclusions the game centers on are anathema to them. Final Fantasy XVI and Bioshock: Infinite come to mind. Many developers correctly ascertain that focusing on the quality of the writing is a waste of time and effort if they&#x27;re not targeting a particular audience, rather than aiming for sales in the multi-millions.<p>Good writing is often challenging, and pairing that intellectual challenge with the tactical&#x2F;strategic&#x2F;visceral challenge of gameplay can be overwhelming. Spec Ops: The Line is a good example of this: players work their way through a grueling gauntlet only to be asked to deeply question their efforts, and even their enjoyment of the game itself. You just expended a massive amount of effort to do what the game told you to do, and now the game is telling you, the player, off for it. If art is a matter of curation of experience, then such an approach is maximalism that&#x27;s bound to turn some off.

Because the people who buy them don’t think it’s terrible, or at least not enough of a problem to get them to not buy them. And anyway it’s subjective, it’s a form with tropes and some people just love a game (or movie, or tv show) that delivers on that even if it’s “bad writing.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

There&#x27;s great writing in games. I&#x27;ve experienced writing in games that&#x27;s moved me to tears, and this is going back decades.<p>There&#x27;s &#x27;terrible&#x27; writing in a lot of high budget, usually mass-appeal market games.<p>I would argue that&#x27;s true of any medium -- films, books, theater, even music.

I’m one of those people who skips all the cutscenes. Very few games have stories interesting enough to pay attention to outside of what they show you through gameplay. If I want a good story I’ll watch a movie or read a book. To me games are for the interactivity.

Along the same line of questioning: Why are so much movie and TV show scripts so bad?<p>I keep asking myself, are these companies hiring 15yo children to write content for their Billion dollar projects? Because everyone is talking like they are teenagers.

I think a lot of the time game acting and character modeling is actually worse than the writing itself. To me, there was an uncanny valley when voice acting became the standard. A lot of performances degrade the script itself, whatever you think of the script. It also makes me think of Harrison Ford&#x27;s line about the Star Wars movies. &quot;George! You can type this shit, but you sure can&#x27;t say it! Move your mouth when you&#x27;re typing!&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t quite what Harrison Ford meant, but it feels like a lot of writing feels worse when it has to be acted and performed. When I just read it, my mind fills in the blanks, so to speak, and the &quot;performance&quot; feels more natural.<p>This is also a bit of an aside, but I also find it incredibly distracting when people in some made-up fantasy world happen to emote and speak just like trendy people today. &quot;Oh, these hardened warriors, who have had a life wholly unlike anything I&#x27;ve ever experienced speak just like American actors in a movie made after 2020.&quot;

Horizon zero dawn has great writing and storytelling too

Needs 2021 in title. Also Rest in peace Shamus Young :(

Game storytelling is different from movie storytelling and that’s fine. Most of your time with a character in a game is not spent performing the actions written in the script. The character doesn’t mostly live in the script, they mostly live in the gameplay and the environment interactions. It is a different type of storytelling, just like movies and books are different.

Yes the writing is often an afterthought and besides the point, but most of the games people are listing here are kind of proving the author&#x27;s point, especially BG3. Games with great stories sell better and have a longer shelf life than games with bad stories, so there&#x27;s no reason not to invest in quality writing. Look at what&#x27;s happening with Starfield.

Gameplay problems aside, part of why I stopped playing Square Enix games is because of how incredibly awful the dialog can be in many of their titles. Kingdom Hearts is gibberish on repeat for 30+ hours and Final Fantasy is usually sexist and or racist gibberish for 70+ hours. Not worth it.

Rather annoying title that tries to make opinion come off as fact and a whole lot of paragraphs just to make their opinion seem &#x27;right&#x27;. Many will simply disagree and they are even making successful TV adaptations of games now, the current prime example being The Last of Us.

I am getting a 503 ... its been hackernewsed ...

are there any literary authors who have moved into game development the way musicians have?

They are not playing the right games. RPG games like pillars of eternity, dragon age, baldurs gate, mass-effect, etc have excellent story-lines. Your first person shooter demographic does not care about writing and hence neither will the publisher.

Because the people making them have absolutely nothing to say. The writing is a pretentious sideshow to wrap the game with, like the plot in a movie musical (or in a porno.) To get around vice laws, they used to have naked women paint themselves like Roman statues and strike poses on stage, or read Shakespeare. Alcoholic drinks were sold by the gallon as &quot;health tonics.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s a sign of the decadence we find ourselves in that the pretense becomes honestly mistaken for the actual purpose, rather than something that merchants say and customers smirk at. Even worse, since the vast bulk of the information we have about the past comes from marketing material of various sorts, we simply assume that the world was populated by rubes who just slurped it up.<p>They weren&#x27;t as shrewd as we are, wondering why the plots of video games are stupid. I can&#x27;t wait until generative AI eliminates the entire narrative industry: &quot;Alexa, tell me a story about the war that glorifies the EU and also implies that the CIA is the shadowy unappreciated force that is holding together an unruly human race.&quot; &quot;Cortana, make me a zombie video game that&#x27;s really about depression, but offers no answers.&quot;