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

[Cosmo]

I don’t know

whatever the hell that is

you think that talking about theatre will make writing in cRPGs better. It won’t.

Clearly not if it's you that i keep adressing ...

 

[an Administrator]

Kafka's style would be optimal for an RPG. Short and straight sentences.

“Sir,” he cried out, and all the jackals howled. To me it sounded very remotely like a melody. “Sir, you should end the quarrel which divides the world in two. Our ancestors described a man like you as the one who will do it. We must be free of the Arabs—with air we can breathe, a view of the horizon around us clear of Arabs, no cries of pain from a sheep which an Arab has knifed, and every animal should die peacefully and be left undisturbed for us to drain it empty and clean it right down to the bones. Cleanliness—that’s what we want— nothing but cleanliness.” Now they were all crying and sobbing. “How can you bear it in this world, you noble heart and sweet entrails? Dirt is their white; dirt is their black; their beards are horrible; looking at the corner of their eyes makes one spit; and if they lift their arms, hell opens up in their arm pits. And that’s why, sir, that’s why, my dear sir, with the help of your all-capable hands you must use these scissors to slit right through their throats”. He jerked his head, and in response a jackal came up carrying on its canine tooth a small pair of sewing scissors covered with old rust.

 

[Lurker King]

Roxor’s explanation about the cultural causes of decline in game writing is fine! I think these complaints about lack of data reeks of scientism and miss the point. It doesn’t matter so much whether most game writers have a degree in literature or not, but if game writers share some of the political beliefs usually associated with left post-modernism, genre studies, etc. If that is true, it suggests such a lack of basic common sense that will affect their work. The evidence for this is everywhere (forced lesbian, homo and tranny NPCs, twitter political activism, the omnipresent talk about diversity in many developer interviews, afirmative action in hiring process, gamergate jokes in BG games, etc.). It’s such a basic fact that most developers (not just game writers) are lefties that endorse this SJWs package that you must be blind to ignore this. The other supporting hypothesis is that most people are dumb. You add that up and you get “say-no-to-phallogocentric-patriarchy” verbose diarrhea.

 

[Turjan]

I don't think we should be criticising Locke for that. I read Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, many many other less or more known philosophers, and basically anyone apart from Descartes wrote in such sentences. That seems to have been the style back then.

Exactly. I have the impression that until the 40s and 50s long paragraphs with lots of commas were the norm. The preference for short paragraphs is recent.

Interesting. I always thought that the English language lacks the grammar to support long sentences without the risk of the reader losing track.

 

[Fenix]

Kafka's style would be optimal for an RPG. Short and straight sentences.

I like this more.
In occasion of MMO.

Ambrose Bierce. (~1900)

The Ingenious Patriot

Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:

"May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing armour-plating which no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable, and therefore invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty's Ministers, attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it for a million tumtums."

After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a million tumtums.

"And here," said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from another pocket, "are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, which will pierce that armour. Your Majesty's Royal Brother, the Emperor of Bang, is anxious to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty's throne and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is one million tumtums."

Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into still another pocket, remarking:

"The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted by my peculiar method of treating the armour plates with a new -"

The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach.

"Search this man," he said, "and report how many pockets he has."

"Forty-three, Sire," said the Great Head Factotum, completing the scrutiny.

"May it please your Majesty," cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, "one of them contains tobacco."

"Hold him up by the ankles and shake him," said the King; "then give him a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree issue declaring ingenuity a capital offence."

 

[Lurker King]

Interesting. I always thought that the English language lacks the grammar to support long sentences without the risk of the reader losing track.

I think the problem is not the length of paragraphs, but the length of sentences. Some authors use sentences so long that by mid sentence you forget what they were saying at the begining. You can have lonh paragraphs with short sentences. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I prefer long paragraphs. The point of a paragraph is to delimitate a subject, that’s all. But if I’m talking about an argument and I have to anticipate an objection to make my point, should I write another paragraph? No, because it’s the same subject. The best contemporary philosophers in my opinion all use long paragraphs. It’s a necessity.

 

[Israfael]

I was afraid you would say something along these lines

I suggest you to re-read what I wrote because what you ascribe to me is simply false. I precisely underscored the importance of consequences of your (well, my) actions, never said anything about stats being not relevant (in all those games, they are - you can't pass hundreds of checks without having particular SPECIAL or skill at certain number or %, you can't join factions in Gothic at whim and so on). Have you actually played these games? They are completely opposite of what you describe.

Your stats don’t matter, your skills don’t matter, the setting doesn’t matter, etc. It’s empty freedom.

What matters is that you are a creative agent ___along___ with the authors who provide you enough latitude to veer off-road. If you don't like those games, look at Deus Ex.

Just ask yourself: “Does it make any sense that one person could murder an entire city alone?”.

As i said, screw with the realism, we are playing A GAME here, not an interactive novel or movie. And yes, one person can definitely kill a small town of few hundred people, check Martin Heemeyer and fine gentlemen like Butch Cassidy and his pals. According to the 40k lore, one spess muhreen can conquer whole planets. The premise does not matter, what matters is what kind of freedoms you are bestowed in its margins.

 

[Lurker King]

I suggest you to re-read what I wrote because what you ascribe to me is simply false.

I read well. cRPGs are a specific type of game with abstract systems that attempt to model certain aspects of the reality, such as stats and skills. Therefore, it's in the very nature of cRPGs to aim some sort of realism. FOs are filled with broken scenarios and skill/stat checks. You can act like a Rambo in the beginning of the game. It’s idiotic. This screw realism excuse is behind every popamole decision in game industry. How can you kill a fucking dragon in level 2? “Who cares?! This is a gamy, not real world, screw realism”. Ok, but you can invest all your skill points in sword and then kill your enemy with a staff? “Duh, this is fiction”, and so on. To be fair, FOs do have some gated content and harder enemies, and even if they hadn’t, they would still be one of my favorite games for the setting alone and skill checks alone. My disagreement is that the things that made the game great for me are not the same things that made the game great for you. If you want an open world, go for it. I want a game world that makes sense and this will restrict your actions.

 

[vdweller]

Kafka's style would be optimal for an RPG. Short and straight sentences.

Charles Bukowski's style would make an excellent RPG narrative too:

"The king took the battlemage's panties and folded them over his cock and began rubbing them"

Now that would be some worldbuilding.

 

[Ismaul]

Roxor’s explanation about the cultural causes of decline in game writing are interesting. I think these complaints about lack of data reeks of scientism and miss the point. It doesn’t matter so much whether most game writers have a degree in literature or not, but if game writers share some of the political beliefs usually associated with left post-modernism, genre studies, etc. If that is true, it suggests such a lack of basic common sense that will affect their work. The evidence for this is everywhere (forced lesbian, homo and tranny NPCs, twitter political activism, the omnipresent talk about diversity in many developer interviews, afirmative action in hiring process, gamergate jokes in BG games, etc.).

Yeah it's the agenda pushing that's obnoxious. Them being on a mission to "educate" us plebs.

Lesbians are hot tho. Especially with Mass Effect graphics. I don't mind them being inserted in the game.

I'm really conflicted about this issue.

 

[Perkel]

50 shades of rpg

I woke up today,
still laying on smelly bed put my hand on mouse.
It felt like balls.
I switched on Pillars of Eternity.
Aloth is standing ready to be added to my party..
ALT+F4

FUCK THIS SHIT, FUCK... my life.

I grabbed my mouse as hard as i could as if...

It was mistake. It wasn't mouse.

I blame you. For this and every mistake in life i made.
Dog looks at me. He barks "The fuck 'ur sayin' ?". He knows.

I woke up. My head hurts. I look up. Aloth is still standing there... cunt.
But it doesn't matter. Bottle is almost empty.

...always is.

edit: made some changes to script.

 

[Job Creator]

Stainless Veteran, it's very encouraging to see that people on an Internet forum are willing to fight to the death over Tolstoy's writing abilities. Truly, we live in the age of intellectualism.

Nah you're just Russian

 

[MrBuzzKill]

What about punchlines that make you go "fuck yeah!" and interesting stuff that makes you go "hmm!"? A lot of games dialogues feel like an endless wanking session without the eventual reward of orgasm. You're being fed a lot of text for no reward at all. You don't go "fuck yeah!" (something really funny, powerful or fun happened) or "hmm!" (an interesting idea was fed to your mind, expanding it). Just consider this forum as a good example of this. What gathers the most brofists here? Not the endless pseudointellectual back and forth. It's when somebody says something funny, or turns a phrase in a powerful and concise way that pleases a lot of people. Or when somebody says something truly interesting and insightful, giving you actual new information to ponder. Remember how much fun illustrated encyclopedias were? How they would expand your mind?

Spoiler

I hope this is not a sign that I'm becoming a casual, or worse, that I always was one and just now reached the level of sophistication needed to even express my casualness

 

[set]

The whole article was founded on the whole opening point, 'RPG writers are not seriously invested in scienice, politics, philosophy, or art, and so they don't make good video game writers, aren't polish, and don't have good degrees from a good university' but uses no science, politics, history, philosophy, or art to accurately back up this entire point. So, it's basically a waste of our time. Not even a statistic about what degrees RPG writers DO hold, by rough percentage.

Also, the article talks only about bad games and does not really attempt to explain how good games exceed even if it mentions a few minor things. It never discusses why Baldur's Gate does/does not succeed with its narrative, or VTMB, or really any classic RPG.

It's just blind Tolkien-hate, too.

 

[Lurker King]

No, that’s just the part when he tries to explain why we have so many incompetent writers in the game industry – which is very informative, by the way. Roxor presents and discuss many examples of bad writing, explaining why they are instances of bad writing and providing examples of better writing.

 

[Neanderthal]

You know mullin over Roxor's article an havin a ponder while takin a constitional I came to a kinda connected conclusion: Now i've said afore how I detest how handholdy, idiot proof an lackin subtlety games are now, even though I realise why that is when dipshit players want big glowin quest markers, stripped features an linear corridors wi a succession o combat an loot rather than intricate theatres of cinflict or god forbid well designed worldbuildin. Devs think o their audience in lowest possible terms, its okay to preach at somebody you thinks a fuckin moron, hold their hand an explain every little detail, because the fuckin retard kids need it, an lap the shit up to boot. An in some cases they're right, look at typical Bethesda, Blizzard an Bioware players, they're a bunch o squeein fucknuts who'll make all excuses under sun to defend their degeneratin franchises. Thus you get shit writin that says nothin in a lot o sentences, cause the players'll never notice.

Thing is a lot on us now are as old or older than developers, have lived an worked in more broad aspects o life, are maybe equally or better educated (I wouldn't know owt about that,) possess more experience or knowledge o games an more importantly life, an were brought up on media that didn't speak down to us, an we're expectin better than some ramblin waffle or high handed preachin from a child whose chins still wet from their mothers milk. An we're usually much better fuckin players. Askin devs to meet our requirements in terms o quality, match quarter century old games, an treat us wi a bit o fuckin respect int much to ask for in my opinion an should be industry standard.

Then again when you've got millions o the 3 B's players linin up to get arse raped by latest installment o their shit series...well you can't fault dev for slippin on a condom an startin to ease it in, easier money than a choosy customer.

 

[Azarkon]

We've had several discussions about this in the past. DarthRoxor's own thread is one of them; http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/pretentious-lore.112914/ is another, probably the most recent, and reaches many of the same conclusions.

But I want to raise the question of why this problem is so prevalent in recent CRPGs, and my opinion is that it is primarily a question of cost. DarthRoxor brushes upon this briefly but does not emphasize it enough: the CRPG developers most guilty of over exposition, purple prose, and excessive novelization are those who, for one reason or another, have effectively given up on AAA CRPGs, yet still want to make AAA products.

Take Obsidian as an example. The company tried to make AAA CRPGs, like Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, and nearly went bankrupt doing it. They were saved by the success of Pillars of Eternity, an "old school" CRPG with all the aforementioned writing problems. Why did Obsidian choose this direction? I can't help but think that it's because they're compensating for the fact that their game doesn't have AAA graphics and voice acting. That is to say, over writing in Obsidian games is an attempt to bring prestige to a medium that they themselves believe is fundamentally not prestigious. Since they lack the $$$ to make it cinematic, they'll "make up" for it with words, words, and more words, so as to fulfill their internal standard and distinguish their offering from the dozens of other low cost CRPGs on the market.

There's probably a similar motivation behind Torment. Developers know they don't have the $$$ for "cinematic" experiences, yet don't want to be seen as making low cost games, so they try to market their products by word count. Writers are, after all, cheaper than artists and animators, and since there is a long tradition of equating "narrative" and "world building" with "writing," we can pretend that the lack of AAA presentation won't affect the quality of the narrative or the world building as long as we replace every missing pixel with words. Indeed, this has long been a popular Codex belief.

The problem is, pixels cannot be replaced by words. A picture is worth a thousand words, yet very few people are willing to read a thousand words for each picture missing. You cannot replace AAA graphics and voice acting by increasing the word count. It doesn't work that way. There's a maximum that people are willing to tolerate with respect to exposition, description, and dialogue in a game, and longer is not better.

Instead of spending all the time on writing excessive amounts of lore, I think developers of independent CRPGs would be much better served with making smarter and more elegant use of the writing space. Instead of committing to 500,000 words of purple prose, commit instead to 50,000 words of effective dialogue, terse descriptions, and a well-motivated narrative. Or better yet, don't set a goal for amount of words at all, and spend more time on internal review, criticism, and editing.

But perhaps much of it simply comes down to finding the right people for the job. Game companies should not hire people who want to be writers. They should hire people who want to be game designers. The ability to write effective prose is certainly a plus, but it is not nearly as important as the ability to know when and where words are simply not the appropriate medium for interacting with the player.

 

[Neanderthal]

The problem is, pixels cannot be replaced by words. A picture is worth a thousand words, yet very few people are willing to read a thousand words for each picture missing.

I agree mostly but I don't think good prose should be underestimated for its brute force effectiveness, take Sensoriums in Torment for instance, can't imagine even a AAA+ game dein able to render all them scenes an images that are described so well, from manipulation o Deionarra, soarin through skies o Elemental Plane of Air on mechanical wings, bein invested as Empress of an Oriental realm while keepin secret fact that you're an imposter, to a flyin armada of arcane airships poundin a continent an all its people into non existence while tryin to avoid the guilt an madness o your actions.

Sometimes prose can be a very effective shortcut, but as you say too often its waffle for sake o waffle.

 

[set]

Let's get things straight here: "post modernism" "college degrees" (since when does this matter vs real world experience) "leftism" have absolutely no effect on game writing or RPG quality.

If Mass Effect 3 had had its stupid hamfisted leftist pandering but still had a good story and characterization...with good gameplay...it would have been a great game. I can suspend my disbelief about hyper extreme leftist values -- as an example, look at the amazingly fun little title "Liberal Crime Squad", that parodies politics -- do the things espoused in that game make it bad or dumb? Fuck no. I could totally enjoy myself playing as a super hardcore liberal "liberating" ignorant redneck masses JUST as much as I could enjoy murdering leftist uptight diversitymongers with a shotgun. The context of your game can be fun, politics aside. Gamergate succeeding or failing will not positively or negatively improve game writing. Pandering has always been a problem, but Baldur's Gate 2's pandering with its romances is atrocious -- and yet it contains one of my favorite characters, Viconia... because she actually has an arc! With a chance to make her Lawful Neutral or whatever! (too many rpg characters are STATIC and never change) Writing quality, story quality, enjoyment of characters and narrative etc. exist without relation to the level of shitty fantic-tier pandering.

College gives you a grounding to work from. If you're shit at what you do, no piece of paper will change that. We se this in nearly every profession...well, except for a few. You won't find many good doctors without a fully qualifying degree, for obvious reasons - but writing, computer programming, law... you can master these things without schooling. You can master them on your own grit and personal experience and research. Obviously good schooling and pedigree helps, but that's not the problem.

"Post modernism" is another red herring. "Post modernism" has been around for a long fucking time. It was around before video games ever were. Do you think a game like Fallout could exist without postmodern awareness during the writing process? I mean, Fallout isn't pretentious, if that's what "post modernism" is supposed to stand in for...



The reason why new games and the writing for new games suck is simple - the industry has changed. Fallout 1 was made by a small, passinate team. Vampire the Masquerade was made by an experienced, passionate team.

You won't find small, passionate and experienced teams making games anymore. AAA are 50+ man teams. Indies are new outsiders looking to break into the business. The kinds of companies that made the classic greats are gone. The companies that occupy weird spaces, like Obsidian or inXile, are the outliers for this expalnation - but let's not forget Obsidian has made some great and terrible games in their time (Kotor2 vs NWN2 vs POE) and that inXile's marketing strategy is more or less "pandering to nostalgia". Obsidian is an example that it's not easy to find a forumla which explains the function of X+Y=good game writing. Does Kotor 2 have good writing? I like Kreia's monologues, but what else stands out...? Can you recall what any major character from NWN2? What about MOTB?

Writing in video games has atrophied because nobody has yet espoused how to do it right. It's hard for the 'classics' to be replicated without this distilliation of process. We have some good examples (I think VTMB's writing is p gud, but it's not like...ever going to be example of "do it this way"), but nobody has articulated how it's done, AFAIK.

What tools exist to streamline video game writing? Twine? rofl -- yeah right.
We have things like Unity, or just better programming techniques, now to streamline game development - it's how graphics have gotten so much better, so much cheaper. Where is writing in this regard?

Are there any industry-standard practices that have come out of the success of any single well-written RPG? Not really.

The whole Numenera thing being 1 million words is just because Torment was touted on the back of its box as being XYZ thousand words. They're just copying that market strategy because they are literally doing nolstagia marketing tactics.

The article brings up some good examples, but it has no coheisve argument that explains why RPG writing is lacking. I like the argument that "writing a lot of words isn't necessarily the solution" - yet clearly, lots of people liked Torment, so it's not a universal rule.

The best way to make a well-written RPG is to have a good vision. To have a good vision, you need to have the right producers, the right VPs in your company making decisions that are passionate, that are best for the PRODUCT and not for the PROFIT. The industry has changed though - we have fewer "experienced, small startups" in the industry and more profit-centric centers driving RPG creation.



Also, let's not forget about REALLY classic games, like text-based RPGs, where the rendering capability of the game is ASCII. Text REALLY works well for these games; these games can have rich mechanics (because graphics are abstracted by words) and have rich stories. Obviously, these are rarely made anymore, but if you go back far enough you can see that this sort of game DOES work (look at the original Moo engine).

 

[Azarkon]

The problem is, pixels cannot be replaced by words. A picture is worth a thousand words, yet very few people are willing to read a thousand words for each picture missing.

I agree mostly but I don't think good prose should be underestimated for its brute force effectiveness, take Sensoriums in Torment for instance, can't imagine even a AAA+ game dein able to render all them scenes an images that are described so well, from manipulation o Deionarra, soarin through skies o Elemental Plane of Air on mechanical wings, bein invested as Empress of an Oriental realm while keepin secret fact that you're an imposter, to a flyin armada of arcane airships poundin a continent an all its people into non existence while tryin to avoid the guilt an madness o your actions.

Sometimes prose can be a very effective shortcut, but as you say too often its waffle for sake o waffle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that prose cannot be as effective or more effective than pictures, but rather, that the two serve different roles, and you cannot compensate for one with the other. Knowing when to use pictures and when to use text is itself an art. Since you brought up Planescape: Torment, I'll just use an example of a paragraph that would be very difficult to convey graphically:

The sphere wrinkles in your hands, the skin of the sphere peeling away into tears and turning into a rain of bronze that encircles you. Each droplet, each fragment that enters you, you feel a new memory stirring, a lost love, a forgotten pain, an ache of loss - and with it, comes the great pressure of regret, regret of careless actions, the regret of suffering, regret of war, regret of death, and you feel your mind begin buckling from the pressure - so MUCH, all at once, so much damage done to others... so much so an entire FORTRESS may be built from such pain. And suddenly, through the torrent of regrets, you feel the first incarnation again. His hand, invisible and weightless, is upon your shoulder, steadying you. He doesn't speak, but with his touch, you suddenly remember your name. ...and it is such a simple thing, not at all what you thought it might be, and you feel yourself suddenly comforted. In knowing your name, your true name, you know that you have gained back perhaps the most important part of yourself. In knowing your name, you know yourself, and you know, now, there is very little you cannot do.

You can show the sphere unraveling; you can show examples of past memories; you can show the First Incarnation putting a hand on the Nameless One's shoulder... But none of it is even close to having the same impact as the above paragraph. This is an example of when text must be used.

The article has plenty of examples of the opposite - that is, cases where text should not be used, or when it is simply redundant.

 

[RK47]

 

[set]

To be fair, conversations like that don't really matter anyway. So maybe that's the crux of the problem. Interacting with a nameless, faceless, pointless "raider" -- does the quality of writing there even matter? Not to entirely excuse it (that writing is poor), but maybe you could argue they were right not to focus cleaning up writing for those characters with the time they had.

...when you make a game like POE, there's going to be a lot of writing. You can't expect the raider "to not speak" there, right? Some of the writing as a result is going to be lesser than in other places.

 

[Sentinel]

Damn. Actually read it all. Excellent article.
Wish writers would be forced to read it. Especially those faggots at Obsidian, since I don't give a fuck about InXile.

 

[Azarkon]

The general idea is that talented science fiction authors were often scientists and talented fantasy authors were often trained in the humanities (specifically in the sense of being analytic and not primarily focused on empirical study). It isn't too hard to substantiate the claim, at the very least, that there are many: Asimov -- a biochemist (and to some degree a polymath, probably). Arthur Conan Doyle -- a physician. The obvious examples are Tolkein, who was a philologist, and C.S. Lewis, who was educated in Ancient Greek and Latin literature and Philosophy (and was an infantryman in the first world war--military experience actually seems quite common among highly regarded authors). Lewis Carroll was a logician and mathematician. That's off the top of my head.

I would even say that Carl Sagan wrote more evocative passages in The Dragons of Eden, Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Cosmos, than nearly all writers in the video game industry to date. And that Plato and Berkeley wrote more engaging dialogues! Of course this is cherry-picking, as I'm fairly confident from experience that the majority of scientists and philosophers have bad to atrocious writing abilities, but again the general idea is that great scientists and philosophers can express complex ideas with clarity and cohesion--to themselves and to others.

There are cases of brilliant authors without formal educations or with educations in literature, of course, but the underlying idea is that talented writers tend to be skilled philosophers and logicians (informally or formally) who often possess 1) analytic habits and the ability to handle a large amount of complex information (without falling into the absurdity of relativism); and 2) an impressive amount of general knowledge or insight into human affairs, and/or a great depth of knowledge in a complex/meaningful subject. e.g. physics, chemistry, epistemology, ethics, logic--mathematics, computer programming, philology, psychology.

Take the exceptions: all you need to do is read the beginning of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue to see that he has an analytic and insightful mind even though he dropped out of university (after pursing something to do with language, I believe). Or Ursula K. Leguin, a highly regarded science fiction author with a Master's in French and Italian literature, who also had a heavy interest in philosophy and ended up producing a well regarded translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.

The fact that many talented authors tend be formally educated in analytic disciplines is likely because those fields attract people who already have analytic minds, but I think Roxor's point about education and general epistemological bent is an integral part of locating the... carcass in the well of video game writing--which actually maps on rather nicely to the general divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Though geographically there are obtuse "analytic" philosophers and concise/analytic continental philosophers... and presently the western analytic tradition is being polluted with rubbish like 'feminist epistemology' and other relativist nonsense.​

I think we can all agree that modern degrees in "creative writing" is often a synonym for "bullshitting through school," but historically speaking, "creative writing" is a red herring, as there was no such discipline. Early 20th century writers typically majored in literary studies, which continues to exist in majors like "English" or "English literature" today, minus the liberal electives short cut. I went through such a program at a top university so I can speak to what it's about - ie a lot of reading & analysis of the Western Canon. Darth Roxor probably had the same experience though perhaps for a different language.

Famous writers who came out of such a background are fairly common. Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner off the top of my head, all had such degrees, either in English or in another language. The practice used to be that you would get an education in literature and write at the same time, hoping to make a name for yourself, and eventually become a teacher/professor or a full time writer. Literature degrees were/are not the problem, and it would surprise me to learn that more top writers came out of philosophy, science, and logic than literature studies, because that's just not the case from what I remember of those people's education history.

The problem with liberal arts education today is more that 1) majors like "creative writing" are rarely held to any standard, because everybody gets a star for effort; 2) the proliferation of majors like gender studies where moral outrage is all you need to succeed; and 3) the incompatibility that has always existed between writing literature and writing for video games. You simply cannot hire Faulkner to write for Pillars of Eternity - though I'd be highly amused at his take - because he is a WRITER, not a GAME DESIGNER. It's like asking Tolkien to direct Lord of the Rings.

 

[Fenix]

But perhaps much of it simply comes down to finding the right people for the job.

"Cadres define everything" Joseph Stalin.

Let's get things straight here: "post modernism" "college degrees" (since when does this matter vs real world experience) "leftism" have absolutely no effect on game writing or RPG quality.

Yeah, because they have effect on cultural enviroment, which in turn affect absolutely ALL fields of society, and ALL spheres of art - same for films, literature, music.
All turns in stagnant swamp.

Judging by your next text it seems you don't understand, or better have no idea how it works. It is not about content in Games that was or wasn't affected by Gamersgame, it is about creativity that is constantly murdered in cultural enviroment that can be described as "leftists" "post modernism" and "relativism".
You can't be a good writer if you can't define Good from Evil, that the first thing that came to my mind.
People that grew in such enviroment are like those who hanging in the void, vacuum - no orienting points, no ground under their feet, nothing to becom a true personality, and without it you can't really write good about sanything.
Look at movie industry in US - it is almost in lethargy, sequels, prequels, spinoffs, reboots, movies about COMICS lol. Stagnation, and next - only pupation.

Fallout was just lucky - we can't see more of such games anymore.
Industry has literally NOTHING with it. It's always, I don't know right word - repel me? pushed me? when people got confused with cause and effect, the general and the particular.
The particular can't have more importance than the general, and can't be a cause, it is only effect.
First cultural enviroment has changed, next - industry has changed.

Writing in video games has atrophied because nobody has yet espoused how to do it right.

No, it's because next generation is very different from previous.
Modern world full of amazing thing that never happened before.
There is always cultural gap between generations - it is a normal thing.
But in modern satanic world this cultural gap reached such magnitude, that it has become a phenomenon known as "barbarism".
Barbarism before - it's when hordes of barbarians conquered Roman Empire, and lived among ruins where once the Romans lived.
Modern Barbarism is when barbarians isn't an external force, but every next generation is so different from the previous that can be considered as barbarian.

nobody has articulated how it's done

Because it is impossible, it is you are capable or you are not, it isn't some intricate mechanism, it is live process, and you can't dissect it on parts.

The best way to make a well-written RPG is to have a good vision. To have a good vision, you need to have the right producers, the right VPs in your company making decisions that are passionate, that are best for the PRODUCT and not for the PROFIT.

It doesn't work like that, and PoE shows it.

It's one thing to write because you really enjoy writing and have a story you want to tell, it's another thing to write because you want to call yourself a writer. Kids see respected writers who got there through hard work and effort, and they try to mimic the markers of success rather than the effort. When leftists write, their goal is primarily to spread leftism, which is how they get recognized by the leftist writing establishment. It's a form of social signalling.

Well done! Perfect point! FORMATTINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG