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

[Hell March]

You can't be a good writer if you can't define good from evil? What on earth are you talking about? How many of what western civilization considers to be great novelists had anything to say on the divide? You realize that you can construct entire literary canons out of books that have nothing to do with good, evil, war or peace.

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.

This is much closer to the real of it, and it highlights part of the reasoning for why RPG writing falls behind other major storytelling mediums. But somehow you manage to construe people just not giving a fuck (beyond prestige) about what they write as some sort of leftist degeneracy--I have no idea how you managed to paint a picture of writers simultaneously working for prestige & leftist dogma at the same time. You do realize that if every leftist was so stupid that people spoonfeeding them tepid tales of checking privilege were seen as good writers, there wouldn't be any leftists even qualified to hold the lowest political office, right? The simple fact of the matter is that the writers simply only care about their job in the business sense and that the audience, by and large, does not care either. No one's going to go out of their way to fill out a liberal checklist when they can just as easily go full stream of consciousness and receive the same results.

 

[laclongquan]

Because that single ability formed from the core being of each person. You evaluate things based on your own set of moral and define which is Good and which is Evil. If you can not define that, there's a personal problem.

And a writer can not afford that sort of deficiency. Not if you are any good.

 

[Kaivokz]

Open up Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understading' for an easy example of an obtuse analytic philosopher. His writing is full of sentences with 15+ commas that go on for a page and a half. I'm sure there are other examples.

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.

It changed a little bit, but not much. Quine, one of the most 'important' analytic philosophers, was as obtuse as it gets. (I'd say that in his writings style is 90% of what there is.)[got it?]

Contemporary analytic philosophy almost always requires you to read hugely complicated sentences or to have a good background in math.

I wasn't criticizing Locke as a philosopher, but as a writer. The primary goal of a philosopher who is writing qua philosopher is to convey something meaningful for ethics, logic, epistemology, or one of the other things philosophers are concerned with. It's obvious that a poorly expressed but meaningful thought is a better piece of philosophy than an eloquent and utterly pointless one.

Spinoza's Ethics are far easier to read than Locke, if you ask me. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is easier to read, too, but harder to understand. Neither the Ethics nor the Tractatus taken as whole works are good examples of a writing style you would want in a video game, though some of the one liners are punchy. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." And so forth.

That's why I initially brought up people like Plato and Carl Sagan. You could count Bertrand Russell and a number of other "proper" analytic philosophers among those writers who both had meaningful things to say and the ability to convey them in evocative and simple terms (read: not complicated for the sake of being complicated, or using jargon to insulate one's work from outside criticism, and so on).

'Jargon' often makes sentences simpler; you can use two words, 'my epistemology', instead of four, 'my theory of knowledge', or more: 'my theory of what it means to know something.' Define 'epistemology' once and then reference that complex set of ideas with one word instead of many. That is simplifying and conveying complex ideas in the relevant way; by simple I'm not suggesting that the meaning must be immediately apparent or the vocabulary rudimentary.

Same with a story; a meaningful story will often require effort from the reader, but the point is to convey meaning such that, as much as possible, the ideas require effort to understand, not their method of conveyance. This also helps a writer ensure that his ideas actually make sense (that they're cohesive). For example, in philosophy it's often much easier to see incoherence in an argument if it is presented in numbered premise-conclusion form rather than paragraph form (though there are some cases where this isn't true), simply because it's much easier to identify a suspicious premise or to see that the conclusion doesn't actually follow even if all the premises as true.

That reminds me of something Russell once said: the goal of philosophy is to produce a controversial conclusion from incontroversial premises.

 

[Anubioz]

I haven't finished reading yet, but my feelings are already hurt. A good RPG isn't defined by its writing, but rather by the integrity of the whole experience. Author obviously confuses roguelikes for RPGs. An RPG might have awful writing, awful graphics, awful controls but still be amazingly enjoyable (i.e. Age of Decadence). A roguelike can have awful graphics, awful controls but still be incredibly awesome (Dwarf Fortress, ADOM). What is the difference between two? it is writing. You can't have a good RPG without any writing at all (since it would be ARGP at best). Keep in mind that reading every bit of text is never forced in RPGs - you always got an option to skip anything you don't like, solve most of problems with bruteforce & still succeed (otherwise the game would be called "an adventure", not "an RPG").

So I don't see any problem with putting a lot of text into a game. Quite the opposite - I think that excessive text adds a lot to replayability - on my first play-through I deliberately click-though most dialogues that I don't feel like reading at that moment. Later (when I basically know how things work in that particular game) they add a lot of "depth" to the world. One can call those skipped dialogues "game lore".

 

[Reapa]

Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs) Related Poem Content Details
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower;
When these are gone by with their glories,
What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
O mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain?

Seven sorrows the priests give their Virgin;
But thy sins, which are seventy times seven,
Seven ages would fail thee to purge in,
And then they would haunt thee in heaven:
Fierce midnights and famishing morrows,
And the loves that complete and control
All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows
That wear out the soul.

O garment not golden but gilded,
O garden where all men may dwell,
O tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven from hell;
O mystical rose of the mire,
O house not of gold but of gain,
O house of unquenchable fire,
Our Lady of Pain!

O lips full of lust and of laughter,
Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,
Bite hard, lest remembrance come after
And press with new lips where you pressed.
For my heart too springs up at the pressure,
Mine eyelids too moisten and burn;
Ah, feed me and fill me with pleasure,
Ere pain come in turn.

In yesterday's reach and to-morrow's,
Out of sight though they lie of to-day,
There have been and there yet shall be sorrows
That smite not and bite not in play.
The life and the love thou despisest,
These hurt us indeed, and in vain,
O wise among women, and wisest,
Our Lady of Pain.

Who gave thee thy wisdom? what stories
That stung thee, what visions that smote?
Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores,
When desire took thee first by the throat?
What bud was the shell of a blossom
That all men may smell to and pluck?
What milk fed thee first at what bosom?
What sins gave thee suck?

We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
Thou art noble and nude and antique;
Libitina thy mother, Priapus
Thy father, a Tuscan and Greek.
We play with light loves in the portal,
And wince and relent and refrain;
Loves die, and we know thee immortal,
Our Lady of Pain.

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

There are sins it may be to discover,
There are deeds it may be to delight.
What new work wilt thou find for thy lover,
What new passions for daytime or night?
What spells that they know not a word of
Whose lives are as leaves overblown?
What tortures undreamt of, unheard of,
Unwritten, unknown?

Ah beautiful passionate body
That never has ached with a heart!
On thy mouth though the kisses are bloody,
Though they sting till it shudder and smart,
More kind than the love we adore is,
They hurt not the heart or the brain,
O bitter and tender Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

As our kisses relax and redouble,
From the lips and the foam and the fangs
Shall no new sin be born for men's trouble,
No dream of impossible pangs?
With the sweet of the sins of old ages
Wilt thou satiate thy soul as of yore?
Too sweet is the rind, say the sages,
Too bitter the core.

Hast thou told all thy secrets the last time,
And bared all thy beauties to one?
Ah, where shall we go then for pastime,
If the worst that can be has been done?
But sweet as the rind was the core is;
We are fain of thee still, we are fain,
O sanguine and subtle Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

By the hunger of change and emotion,
By the thirst of unbearable things,
By despair, the twin-born of devotion,
By the pleasure that winces and stings,
The delight that consumes the desire,
The desire that outruns the delight,
By the cruelty deaf as a fire
And blind as the night,

By the ravenous teeth that have smitten
Through the kisses that blossom and bud,
By the lips intertwisted and bitten
Till the foam has a savour of blood,
By the pulse as it rises and falters,
By the hands as they slacken and strain,
I adjure thee, respond from thine altars,
Our Lady of Pain.

Wilt thou smile as a woman disdaining
The light fire in the veins of a boy?
But he comes to thee sad, without feigning,
Who has wearied of sorrow and joy;
Less careful of labour and glory
Than the elders whose hair has uncurled:
And young, but with fancies as hoary
And grey as the world.

I have passed from the outermost portal
To the shrine where a sin is a prayer;
What care though the service be mortal?
O our Lady of Torture, what care?
All thine the last wine that I pour is,
The last in the chalice we drain,
O fierce and luxurious Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

All thine the new wine of desire,
The fruit of four lips as they clung
Till the hair and the eyelids took fire,
The foam of a serpentine tongue,
The froth of the serpents of pleasure,
More salt than the foam of the sea,
Now felt as a flame, now at leisure
As wine shed for me.

Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen,
Marked cross from the womb and perverse!
They have found out the secret to cozen
The gods that constrain us and curse;
They alone, they are wise, and none other;
Give me place, even me, in their train,
O my sister, my spouse, and my mother,
Our Lady of Pain.

For the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust;
No thorns go as deep as a rose's,
And love is more cruel than lust.
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives;
And marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives.

And pale from the past we draw nigh thee,
And satiate with comfortless hours;
And we know thee, how all men belie thee,
And we gather the fruit of thy flowers;
The passion that slays and recovers,
The pangs and the kisses that rain
On the lips and the limbs of thy lovers,
Our Lady of Pain.

The desire of thy furious embraces
Is more than the wisdom of years,
On the blossom though blood lie in traces,
Though the foliage be sodden with tears.
For the lords in whose keeping the door is
That opens on all who draw breath
Gave the cypress to love, my Dolores,
The myrtle to death.

And they laughed, changing hands in the measure,
And they mixed and made peace after strife;
Pain melted in tears, and was pleasure;
Death tingled with blood, and was life.
Like lovers they melted and tingled,
In the dusk of thine innermost fane;
In the darkness they murmured and mingled,
Our Lady of Pain.

In a twilight where virtues are vices,
In thy chapels, unknown of the sun,
To a tune that enthralls and entices,
They were wed, and the twain were as one.
For the tune from thine altar hath sounded
Since God bade the world's work begin,
And the fume of thine incense abounded,
To sweeten the sin.

Love listens, and paler than ashes,
Through his curls as the crown on them slips,
Lifts languid wet eyelids and lashes,
And laughs with insatiable lips.
Thou shalt hush him with heavy caresses,
With music that scares the profane;
Thou shalt darken his eyes with thy tresses,
Our Lady of Pain.

Thou shalt blind his bright eyes though he wrestle,
Thou shalt chain his light limbs though he strive;
In his lips all thy serpents shall nestle,
In his hands all thy cruelties thrive.
In the daytime thy voice shall go through him,
In his dreams he shall feel thee and ache;
Thou shalt kindle by night and subdue him
Asleep and awake.

Thou shalt touch and make redder his roses
With juice not of fruit nor of bud;
When the sense in the spirit reposes,
Thou shalt quicken the soul through the blood.
Thine, thine the one grace we implore is,
Who would live and not languish or feign,
O sleepless and deadly Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

Dost thou dream, in a respite of slumber,
In a lull of the fires of thy life,
Of the days without name, without number,
When thy will stung the world into strife;
When, a goddess, the pulse of thy passion
Smote kings as they revelled in Rome;
And they hailed thee re-risen, O Thalassian,
Foam-white, from the foam?

When thy lips had such lovers to flatter;
When the city lay red from thy rods,
And thine hands were as arrows to scatter
The children of change and their gods;
When the blood of thy foemen made fervent
A sand never moist from the main,
As one smote them, their lord and thy servant,
Our Lady of Pain.

On sands by the storm never shaken,
Nor wet from the washing of tides;
Nor by foam of the waves overtaken,
Nor winds that the thunder bestrides;
But red from the print of thy paces,
Made smooth for the world and its lords,
Ringed round with a flame of fair faces,
And splendid with swords.

There the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure,
Drew bitter and perilous breath;
There torments laid hold on the treasure
Of limbs too delicious for death;
When thy gardens were lit with live torches;
When the world was a steed for thy rein;
When the nations lay prone in thy porches,
Our Lady of Pain.

When, with flame all around him aspirant,
Stood flushed, as a harp-player stands,
The implacable beautiful tyrant,
Rose-crowned, having death in his hands;
And a sound as the sound of loud water
Smote far through the flight of the fires,
And mixed with the lightning of slaughter
A thunder of lyres.

Dost thou dream of what was and no more is,
The old kingdoms of earth and the kings?
Dost thou hunger for these things, Dolores,
For these, in a world of new things?
But thy bosom no fasts could emaciate,
No hunger compel to complain
Those lips that no bloodshed could satiate,
Our Lady of Pain.

As of old when the world's heart was lighter,
Through thy garments the grace of thee glows,
The white wealth of thy body made whiter
By the blushes of amorous blows,
And seamed with sharp lips and fierce fingers,
And branded by kisses that bruise;
When all shall be gone that now lingers,
Ah, what shall we lose?

Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as melodies yet,
And move to the music of passion
With lithe and lascivious regret.
What ailed us, O gods, to desert you
For creeds that refuse and restrain?
Come down and redeem us from virtue,
Our Lady of Pain.

All shrines that were Vestal are flameless,
But the flame has not fallen from this;
Though obscure be the god, and though nameless
The eyes and the hair that we kiss;
Low fires that love sits by and forges
Fresh heads for his arrows and thine;
Hair loosened and soiled in mid orgies
With kisses and wine.

Thy skin changes country and colour,
And shrivels or swells to a snake's.
Let it brighten and bloat and grow duller,
We know it, the flames and the flakes,
Red brands on it smitten and bitten,
Round skies where a star is a stain,
And the leaves with thy litanies written,
Our Lady of Pain.

On thy bosom though many a kiss be,
There are none such as knew it of old.
Was it Alciphron once or Arisbe,
Male ringlets or feminine gold,
That thy lips met with under the statue,
Whence a look shot out sharp after thieves
From the eyes of the garden-god at you
Across the fig-leaves?

Then still, through dry seasons and moister,
One god had a wreath to his shrine;
Then love was the pearl of his oyster,
And Venus rose red out of wine.
We have all done amiss, choosing rather
Such loves as the wise gods disdain;
Intercede for us thou with thy father,
Our Lady of Pain.

In spring he had crowns of his garden,
Red corn in the heat of the year,
Then hoary green olives that harden
When the grape-blossom freezes with fear;
And milk-budded myrtles with Venus
And vine-leaves with Bacchus he trod;
And ye said, "We have seen, he hath seen us,
A visible God."

What broke off the garlands that girt you?
What sundered you spirit and clay?
Weak sins yet alive are as virtue
To the strength of the sins of that day.
For dried is the blood of thy lover,
Ipsithilla, contracted the vein;
Cry aloud, "Will he rise and recover,
Our Lady of Pain?"

Cry aloud; for the old world is broken:
Cry out; for the Phrygian is priest,
And rears not the bountiful token
And spreads not the fatherly feast.
From the midmost of Ida, from shady
Recesses that murmur at morn,
They have brought and baptized her, Our Lady,
A goddess new-born.

And the chaplets of old are above us,
And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;
Old poets outsing and outlove us,
And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.
Who shall kiss, in thy father's own city,
With such lips as he sang with, again?
Intercede for us all of thy pity,
Our Lady of Pain.

Out of Dindymus heavily laden
Her lions draw bound and unfed
A mother, a mortal, a maiden,
A queen over death and the dead.
She is cold, and her habit is lowly,
Her temple of branches and sods;
Most fruitful and virginal, holy,
A mother of gods.

She hath wasted with fire thine high places,
She hath hidden and marred and made sad
The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces
Of gods that were goodly and glad.
She slays, and her hands are not bloody;
She moves as a moon in the wane,
White-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy,
Our Lady of Pain.

They shall pass and their places be taken,
The gods and the priests that are pure.
They shall pass, and shalt thou not be shaken?
They shall perish, and shalt thou endure?
Death laughs, breathing close and relentless
In the nostrils and eyelids of lust,
With a pinch in his fingers of scentless
And delicate dust.

But the worm shall revive thee with kisses;
Thou shalt change and transmute as a god,
As the rod to a serpent that hisses,
As the serpent again to a rod.
Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said thy prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.

Did he lie? did he laugh? does he know it,
Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,
Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,
Sin's child by incestuous Death?
Did he find out in fire at his waking,
Or discern as his eyelids lost light,
When the bands of the body were breaking
And all came in sight?

Who has known all the evil before us,
Or the tyrannous secrets of time?
Though we match not the dead men that bore us
At a song, at a kiss, at a crime —
Though the heathen outface and outlive us,
And our lives and our longings are twain —
Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,
Our Lady of Pain.

Who are we that embalm and embrace thee
With spices and savours of song?
What is time, that his children should face thee?
What am I, that my lips do thee wrong?
I could hurt thee — but pain would delight thee;
Or caress thee — but love would repel;
And the lovers whose lips would excite thee
Are serpents in hell.

Who now shall content thee as they did,
Thy lovers, when temples were built
And the hair of the sacrifice braided
And the blood of the sacrifice spilt,
In Lampsacus fervent with faces,
In Aphaca red from thy reign,
Who embraced thee with awful embraces,
Our Lady of Pain?

Where are they, Cotytto or Venus,
Astarte or Ashtaroth, where?
Do their hands as we touch come between us?
Is the breath of them hot in thy hair?
From their lips have thy lips taken fever,
With the blood of their bodies grown red?
Hast thou left upon earth a believer
If these men are dead?

They were purple of raiment and golden,
Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,
Thy lovers, in haunts unbeholden,
In marvellous chambers of thine.
They are fled, and their footprints escape us,
Who appraise thee, adore, and abstain,
O daughter of Death and Priapus,
Our Lady of Pain.

What ails us to fear overmeasure,
To praise thee with timorous breath,
O mistress and mother of pleasure,
The one thing as certain as death?
We shall change as the things that we cherish,
Shall fade as they faded before,
As foam upon water shall perish,
As sand upon shore.

We shall know what the darkness discovers,
If the grave-pit be shallow or deep;
And our fathers of old, and our lovers,
We shall know if they sleep not or sleep.
We shall see whether hell be not heaven,
Find out whether tares be not grain,
And the joys of thee seventy times seven,
Our Lady of Pain.

 

[Reapa]

OP, you fail to see the obvious so i will state it for you.
The reason this poem is good is that it's not a poem. It is a protest.
Analog, a game that is just a game made by people, who instead of wanting to say something, want to make a game, will not be good.
It's as simple as that and as sad, since people who make games today want to make games.

Symptoms of this disease are stretch goals for example. If your game lacks anything it's supposed to have you failed. If you can't afford to do what you want to do then fucking don't do it. you can't have a half polished diamond. you can't half bake a cake. you said something about teams not communicating clearly with each other in the game making process and you were right but the reason behind it is not that people have to outsource parts of the game, it's because they don't care if they outsource parts of the game. and they don't care because all they want is to sell something quick instead of doing something well. and that again is because they have nothing do do well to begin with. the very goal is to sell something quick instead of producing something worth producing and having something worth saying. An artist will not have parts of his project done by other people for financial reasons, he would not risk his message being corrupted. an artist would not risk his art.

 

[Black Angel]

An RPG might have awful writing, awful graphics, awful controls but still be amazingly enjoyable (i.e. Age of Decadence).

What the fuck

So I don't see any problem with putting a lot of text into a game. Quite the opposite - I think that excessive text adds a lot to replayability - on my first play-through I deliberately click-though most dialogues that I don't feel like reading at that moment. Later (when I basically know how things work in that particular game) they add a lot of "depth" to the world. One can call those skipped dialogues "game lore".

What if along those bits of texts lies crucial information to solve some quests? Sure, you can resort to violence but what if you hit a brick wall, hard, and face-first with some particularly hard fights not even meant for your character?

The only way I can see that kind of approach working is when the game have quests markers and pop-up journals. Those bolded part also reeks of intense LARPing.

 

[laclongquan]

I am in agreement with Grampy_Bone about authors, editors, and leftism conspiracy in US publishing industry.
The issue, however, is how to make clear to game writers that we are not slurping their propaganda.
But frankly, the biggest issue is their level. They are terrible writers, period.
Shit, modders can fix almost everything else other than writing. Witness Fallout3's shit writings. I refuse to install/play it despite many good mods because nothing can hide the stench of terrible writing quality.

Codex will not scale to their level.

 

[felipepepe]

My huehue mind flies over all this talk about Russian authors & philosophers and just chuckles at Sulik saying he agrees with Grampy Bone.

 

[tormund]

Yup, that second chapter is going to make a lot of people groan. Still, it's a common Codexian/Gamergatian viewpoint and it deserves to be aired eloquently.

Glad to see that you wasted no time in assigning his article to a specific ideological agenda, so that it may be instantly discarded as such. Thank you for sparing the time of us Codexers. Much shalom.

 

[Ludo Lense]

leftism conspiracy

If this and Roxor's article were true shouldn't there be a glut of "proper" indie titles with "proper" writing?

Sorry to say but bad writing is by and large apolitical.

 

[Fenix]

You can't be a good writer if you can't define good from evil?

Yes.

How many of what western civilization considers to be great novelists had anything to say on the divide?

First - many considers that "dunk and humid air" is a great text, and not graphomania, same for modern literature and films.
So what is considered and what really IS it's a different matter, surprised I need to explain that.
For me literature in general ceased to exist in US somewhen around 50s.
Second - I didn't say writer HAD TO SAY something.

ou realize that you can construct entire literary canons out of books that have nothing to do with good, evil, war or peace.

Yeah, the books nobody want to read. Except those who wrote them.

A good RPG isn't defined by its writing, but rather by the integrity of the whole experience.

...which in turn defined by how good writing is.

OP, you fail to see the obvious so i will state it for you.
The reason this poem is good is that it's not a poem. It is a protest.
Analog, a game that is just a game made by people, who instead of wanting to say something, want to make a game, will not be good.
It's as simple as that and as sad, since people who make games today want to make games.

Symptoms of this disease are stretch goals for example. If your game lacks anything it's supposed to have you failed. If you can't afford to do what you want to do then fucking don't do it. you can't have a half polished diamond. you can't half bake a cake. you said something about teams not communicating clearly with each other in the game making process and you were right but the reason behind it is not that people have to outsource parts of the game, it's because they don't care if they outsource parts of the game. and they don't care because all they want is to sell something quick instead of doing something well. and that again is because they have nothing do do well to begin with. the very goal is to sell something quick instead of producing something worth producing and having something worth saying. An artist will not have parts of his project done by other people for financial reasons, he would not risk his message being corrupted. an artist would not risk his art.

Agree but that doesn't contradict with article.

Sorry to say but bad writing is by and large apolitical.

Tell it to that character in Dragonspear - Oh, my parents thought I was a boy when I was not, oh, who I might be with a cunt and thinking that I'm a boy, oh, I'm so important character that willing to tell everybody about my man-cunt.
Yeah, IT IS POLITICAL, and it is AWFUL.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I am in agreement with Grampy_Bone about authors, editors, and leftism conspiracy in US publishing industry.
The issue, however, is how to make clear to game writers that we are not slurping their propaganda.
But frankly, the biggest issue is their level. They are terrible writers, period.
Shit, modders can fix almost everything else other than writing. Witness Fallout3's shit writings. I refuse to install/play it despite many good mods because nothing can hide the stench of terrible writing quality.

Codex will not scale to their level.

I wouldn't say conspiracy, more like zeitgeist. But maybe that is just semantics.

 

[laclongquan]

Tell that to the Hugo award, the Sad Puppies movement, and teh dramaz over leftism conspiracy in US paper publishing.

 

[Archibald]

Wordiness and heavy exposition is being used as an attempt to compensate for a lack of compelling ideas, but not necessarily a problem in themselves. Both optional and quest focussed lore available to player in Morrowind is close to exhaustive in establishing the history and culture of Vvardenfell, political situation, player role, etc. Game doesn't suffer because it's of a generally good standard.

Many people mention Morrowind as doing lore dumps right, but I think thats mostly due to it having rather unique setting. Big problem is that most of the lore dumps in games are "how dwarves fought elves in this totally not-Tolkien setting, version 5245892.12548".

 

[Ismaul]

doing lore dumps right

lel

 

[Lurker King]

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.

You are getting nothing straight here. You are lost, completely lost. I guess that the facts that Tyranny has a caricature of setting based on SJW prejudices, or that Minsc (BG2-EE) make jokes about Gamer Gate, or that Dorn (BG2-EE) and Zevran (DA:O) keep hitting on you like a bitch in season must be just coincidences, then. It is also a coincidence that you have a mechanic for it. If you say “No!” to Zevran the following screen pops up:

Which means that he will become worse in battle because you refused his advances. Now, stop and let that sink in for a bit. Do you think that this has anything to do with SJW activism? The fact that you are being punished for refusing to suck cock? "No, of course not, because you don’t have data!" "This is not scientific enough!" "You need to make controled experiments and publish in a journal!" Yeah, right. And that is not even considering that we live in an era of crisis of reproducibility in science. It doesn't matter what is the type of evidence you have, being anecdotal or otherwise, is how you gather the evidence that counts. An impartial and careful observer can use his personal experiences to infer conclusions about the society which are reliable, and a social scientist can use all the hard data in the world to support his prejudices. To each type of evidence you have specific standards. Saying that every anecdotal evidence is irrelevant because of failured examples is like saying that every hard data is not evidence because it can support fraud in science. It's scientism for retards who never read an epistemology textbook in their lives.

 

[Lurker King]

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. .

Thank you for bringing that up! I will definitely read this thread.

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.

I think you are over overtheorizing things. Let’s stick to the facts:

Fact 1 – PS:T is a cult game.

Fact 2 – Opportunist developers are always looking to imitate successful games in the most simplistic fashion.

Fact 3 – Opportunist developers can’t make triple-A games and decide that is a good idea to cash on the nostalgia of cult games, such as PS:T.

Fact 4 – Since opportunist developers are hacks with a poor understanding of the games they are ripping off, they think that what makes PS:T good is the verbose writing.

Fact 5 – This creates a social incentive for pretentious hacks with artsy ambitions.

Fact 6 – These grotesque attempts to imitate PS:T are praised by game journalists and then become the standards of good writing.

You see, it’s not because they are compensating for lack of graphics of anything, since they never aimed the console audience, it’s because they convinced that smaller audience that this is what we should expect from isometric games with good writing. Their target is a mix of ex-bioware and Interplay fans, not console gamers.

 

[Carrion]

Many people mention Morrowind as doing lore dumps right, but I think thats mostly due to it having rather unique setting.

I'd say that a bigger difference is that Morrowind's "lore dumps" are a part of the setting. Every book in the game is written by someone, and they often contain inaccuracies or outright fallacies, reflecting the politics, culture and religion of Morrowind rather than being some objective, all-knowing accounts of past events that you'll just brainlessly absorb or ignore entirely. You've got fiction, non-fiction, and fiction posing as non-fiction, and it's not always clear which one is which. The main quest revolves around an important event in the past, and you've got several conflicting reports of what actually happened back then, forcing you to make your own interpretations based on all the different sources. Basically Morrowind's lore has another layer to it compared to most cRPGs, and it wouldn't work nearly as well if it was presented in a more standard way, like having a fixed backstory and then making the NPCs vomit it on the player one piece at a time.

 

[Lurker King]

I wasn't criticizing Locke as a philosopher, but as a writer. The primary goal of a philosopher who is writing qua philosopher is to convey something meaningful for ethics, logic, epistemology, or one of the other things philosophers are concerned with. It's obvious that a poorly expressed but meaningful thought is a better piece of philosophy than an eloquent and utterly pointless one.

Spinoza's Ethics are far easier to read than Locke, if you ask me. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is easier to read, too, but harder to understand. Neither the Ethics nor the Tractatus taken as whole works are good examples of a writing style you would want in a video game, though some of the one liners are punchy. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." And so forth.

That's why I initially brought up people like Plato and Carl Sagan. You could count Bertrand Russell and a number of other "proper" analytic philosophers among those writers who both had meaningful things to say and the ability to convey them in evocative and simple terms (read: not complicated for the sake of being complicated, or using jargon to insulate one's work from outside criticism, and so on).

It’s been a long time since I touched Locke’s books, but he always seemed a good writer to me. I think that English authors in general, not just philosophers, tend to value clarity and objectivity a great deal. I agree with Spinoza, but mentioning Wittgenstein in this discussion made me laugh, since he is obscure as fuck, bordering on charlatanism in some parts. I don’t think he is easier to read and hard to understand; I think he is harder to read when he is hard to understand because he is obscure and not always sophisticated as his influence may suggest. One author that I think would fit that bill is Thomas Nagel. You can take his “The Last Word”, for instance, it’s the simpler vocabulary you can think of, but his arguments are so profound and sophisticated.

I think that people that can’t tell the difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy is confused about a bunch of things: they confuse convoluted prose with depth, clear prose with superficiality, profound and subtle distinctions that require mastering of basic concepts with pointless scholasticism, etc. This is also associated with deranged conceptions about writing too. A writing that is clear and concise is perceived as boring or just another one of many interesting forms of writing. They value quantity over quality, literary free style over classic prose, etc. Wich bring us back to the discussion about good writing in cRPGs. I think it is a philosophical discussion too. You can’t expect someone who has philosophical misconceptions about the purposes of writing to even begin to understand Roxor’s criticisms. His arguments presuppose a kind of common sense that many readers don’t have or abandoned because they are intellectually deformed. At the very least you need to assume some standards that people who live in the la-la-la land of playing games with words don't accept.

 

[Fowyr]

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

A propos:

Albion used several font types and sizes.

 

[Tigranes]

Open up Locke's 'Essay Concerning Human Understading' for an easy example of an obtuse analytic philosopher. His writing is full of sentences with 15+ commas that go on for a page and a half. I'm sure there are other examples.

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.

It changed a little bit, but not much. Quine, one of the most 'important' analytic philosophers, was as obtuse as it gets. (I'd say that in his writings style is 90% of what there is.)[got it?]

Contemporary analytic philosophy almost always requires you to read hugely complicated sentences or to have a good background in math.

I wasn't criticizing Locke as a philosopher, but as a writer. The primary goal of a philosopher who is writing qua philosopher is to convey something meaningful for ethics, logic, epistemology, or one of the other things philosophers are concerned with. It's obvious that a poorly expressed but meaningful thought is a better piece of philosophy than an eloquent and utterly pointless one.

Spinoza's Ethics are far easier to read than Locke, if you ask me. Wittgenstein's Tractatus is easier to read, too, but harder to understand. Neither the Ethics nor the Tractatus taken as whole works are good examples of a writing style you would want in a video game, though some of the one liners are punchy. "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen." And so forth.

That's why I initially brought up people like Plato and Carl Sagan. You could count Bertrand Russell and a number of other "proper" analytic philosophers among those writers who both had meaningful things to say and the ability to convey them in evocative and simple terms (read: not complicated for the sake of being complicated, or using jargon to insulate one's work from outside criticism, and so on).

'Jargon' often makes sentences simpler; you can use two words, 'my epistemology', instead of four, 'my theory of knowledge', or more: 'my theory of what it means to know something.' Define 'epistemology' once and then reference that complex set of ideas with one word instead of many. That is simplifying and conveying complex ideas in the relevant way; by simple I'm not suggesting that the meaning must be immediately apparent or the vocabulary rudimentary.

Same with a story; a meaningful story will often require effort from the reader, but the point is to convey meaning such that, as much as possible, the ideas require effort to understand, not their method of conveyance. This also helps a writer ensure that his ideas actually make sense (that they're cohesive). For example, in philosophy it's often much easier to see incoherence in an argument if it is presented in numbered premise-conclusion form rather than paragraph form (though there are some cases where this isn't true), simply because it's much easier to identify a suspicious premise or to see that the conclusion doesn't actually follow even if all the premises as true.

That reminds me of something Russell once said: the goal of philosophy is to produce a controversial conclusion from incontroversial premises.

Good post.

Re. Jargon, it's funny, because a lot more laymen will readily accept that, say, define x in a line of code or in a more scientific (or even scientistic) work is not complexity for the sake of complexity, but just good practice. In that case, you accept the use of long words, and you accept that if a sentence seems packed with 8 different complicated words, that just means that without them the sentence would take a whole page (of repeating stuff). But jargon is often one of the first things brought up in criticism of continental philosophy, humanities, what have you.

One obvious objection is that definitions in the latter works are not precise. I refer those who want an excellent (and clearly written, heh) refutation of this point to Rota's 'The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics upon Philosophy'. In many cases, philosophy and humanistic work involves taking words and concepts we take for granted and unraveling what they really entail, what kinds of assumptions are built into them, etc. - and so the likes of Wittgenstein and Agamben understand that philosophy is often easier to do when you look at it as a problem of the meaning of words. This means that, to put it a bit crudely, sometimes the whole point of the book is to figure out what 'culture' or 'technology' really means, what kinds of ideas we invest into that, how our use of those words and the ideas behind them have changed the world, etc. In that case, it seems rather arse backwards to demand a 8 word dictionary definition.

To be fair, many writers in this space don't make it easy for themselves by abusing the situation - most often because it's so difficult, sometimes as a deliberate act of bad faith (i.e. to conceal weaknesses in their thinking). Far too often you see people slinging around words that they themselves couldn't begin to explain what they mean, creating houses of cards and mirrors. Ironically, this happens a lot less with famous 'impenetratable' writers - Derrida makes stupid puns with differance and whatnot, but in most cases he knows what these things mean and he makes them do work (which is a separate point from whether his theories are any good). It' smuch easier to find such abuse in less competent writers, the kind you're likely to never encounter unless you're working in the field or really engaged with the literature for any other reason. (Caveat - of course well known writers are also guilty of this, e.g. Bourdieu's habitus.)

Anyway, to make it even halfway related to vidya games, I feel like people sometimes have a kneejerk reflex against jargon - 'why is the city named Blar'k Volosk, why do they have their own word for magic' - but that is a little unfair, since you can't avoid it altogether if you don't want to just call everything 'Greentree, town of the elves'. The point is to do it well, which is why we don't complain the same way with the use of cant in PST. Yet this is so difficult, maybe even more than in academia, because now you're up against millions of players' wildly different, non-rational thresholds of what sounds stupidly pretentious to them and what sounds cool.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Every book in the game is written by someone, and they often contain inaccuracies or outright fallacies, reflecting the politics, culture and religion of Morrowind rather than being some objective, all-knowing accounts of past events that you'll just brainlessly absorb or ignore entirely. You've got fiction, non-fiction, and fiction posing as non-fiction, and it's not always clear which one is which. The main quest revolves around an important event in the past, and you've got several conflicting reports of what actually happened back then, forcing you to make your own interpretations based on all the different sources. Basically Morrowind's lore has another layer to it compared to most cRPGs, and it wouldn't work nearly as well if it was presented in a more standard way, like having a fixed backstory and then making the NPCs vomit it on the player one piece at a time.

This is actual postmodern writing by the way.

 

[Lurker King]

If this and Roxor's article were true shouldn't there be a glut of "proper" indie titles with "proper" writing? Sorry to say but bad writing is by and large apolitical.

What Roxor said is that the new leftism is the main responsible for the recent bad writing in cRPGs. He is not defending the stronger, and impossible to defend, thesis that only leftism is the cause of bad writing. From the fact that X is a sufficient condition for Y doesn’t imply that is a necessary condition for Y. Besides, the idea that good writing is apolitical makes no sense, because a pice of writing is good precisely because tells us something interesting about the reality, whether we are considering the human nature, the role of instituitions, etc. So saying that no matter how retarded the system of beliefs is, it can still be good writing is idiotic. I'm start to wonder what kind of books people read here.

 

[sser]

What is the context for this? Like is the character 'high' or sliding into madness or something?