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

[Wayward Son]

One way that I noticed of the show don't tell in video game writing last night was (at points) how Bioware showed the iron crisis in Baldur's Gate. While at times, you'll have people speak directly about the iron crisis, most times it's as a passing thing in conversation as if you should already know it (this feeling more natural and less like a lore dump). One specifically was the miner-turned-fisherman in the area south of where you find Melicamp the chicken. He doesn't directly mention the iron crisis, but he shows that it exists and has a real impact on the people of the game world by talking about how he used to be a miner, but then had to turn to fishing in order to feed his family.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

To quote myself about the story in BG:

It is told in diverse ways - scripted events, dreams you have, ingame books & letters you can find, conversations you can have, rumors you can pick up in taverns, etc. Many of these things are optional, so a player who plays the game more thoroughly would pick up much more of this stuff, hints and foreshadowing or simply some additional flavor. The story unfolds slowly while the player tries to piece together the all different elements he picks up on his own pace.

These diverse story fragments coming together actually resembles the way the story in MW is told, but the latter does it (arguably) more interestingly (and, dare I say it, more postmodern) in that MW leaves more room for uncertainty and interpretation. Still, BG did that kind storytelling pretty well.

 

[laclongquan]

Most strikingly example is when your sword broke in your hand thanks to the crisis duration~

 

[Tigranes]

As for those who don't think Darth Roxor's criticism of liberal education in universities is pertinent, I am studying in a "leftist" uni and I can attest that he has a point.

It's not all the teachers that transmit this SJW thinking, but the quality of teaching and what is asked of students has declined to the point where even poorly written texts get good or ok grades. Standards have been lowered, especially at undergraduate levels. Students are confident in their ignorance, secure that they *know*. Dogmatism is everywhere.

New hires are a problem. There has been a push to get more and more women in teaching positions, to "diversify" the teachers, so we get what we get, sex before competence. I have not had a good philosophy course teached by a woman yet. There is also an agenda to get more women studying philosophy, and they have slowly taken over the departement, the associations and the public discourse. Older teachers can no longer speak their opinions, for fear of having the mob turn against them, with allegations of sexual assault, like they did many times, and are forced to cater to the "clientele" by diversifying their teaching, dropping classical authors for women that might have had something to say, but whose minor contributions are no longer part of the current debates. Quality of education suffers.

And this is only in philosophy. Sociology and other fields are infested with political correctness and even outright ideological shilling. Group-think about oppression is women's "liberation". I hate to say this, but basically, the correlation is this: the more women in a department, the worse it is. Sociology is 80% women.

And I love women - I'm all for equality and humanism. But they hate me, and I'm not even white. I am like a pariah in my own school for having nuanced opinions or wanting to discuss positions instead of accepting them at face-value. I fear a guy like me, not making any friends, even though teachers recognise my worth, will not go far in this field for not being an "ally".

I could go on...

I don't disagree at all that standards are often low, and more problematically, low standards are not called out because being a cranky uncompromising professor is no longer socially acceptable unless you're famous, and you're supposed to coddle your students instead of showing them why it's natural most of what they write now is shit and how they can get better.

What I wonder is whether there is a major "decline" relative to the 60s or 30s, and whether the decline of standards is directly linked to women in the department or whatever. There's no doubt that there's been a huge rise of feminist politics and the like in power across these departments, with various results, but is a general decline in standards one of them? I don't actually know for sure - it's not like I studied in the 50s, or have taught at multiple universities for 80 years, to be able to personally experience the decline, and my conversations with older professors, whether male or female, etc., doesn't reveal a consistent theory. (Some will tell you there is a decline, some will tell you not, they will attribute it to various causes, etc.)

Now, I think feminist politics has gone wildly off course in many areas, many of its advocates are insufferable in ways that aren't just annoying but actively hurt their own causes, and too often they shame and condemn anyone that doesn't sign up to their very specific doctrine, killing intelligent discussion. And I can see, specifically, how this has hurt theoretical diversity or rigorous analysis in certain cases - let's say, a scholar who gets away with shitty writing or weak arguments by dressing it up with womynpower. But there's a big difference between that and making a causal attribution that such things were the primary driver of a massive decline in the basic values of education over the decades - and I would certainly like someone to come out with a concrete, substantiated argument to this effect, so that we can actually understand yes, these people are ruining the humanities, or no, it's just people who don't like their ideas, etc. (E.g. there's a line in the sand over when hyped up committees that overtheorise about everything on these pseudo-feminist terms is merely obnoxious, and when they turn into really dangerous censorship, a line which was being tested the last couple of years with the ridiculous 'safe space' arguments about precious special snowflake students not wanting to read about rape in their literature and such.)

 

[Lurker King]

Example of game that did lore right: Morrowind

Why? Because the lore was tied with what was happening on the main story of the game. Through the lore you saw radically different versions of the same story and how those interpretations shaped Morrowind society. The lore made the main villain even more interesting and the whole story more misterious as you were investigating a mystery that involved a whole people. The lore actually gave context to the things you actually did in the game. On many other RPGs, the lore is stuff you mostly can ignore as they talk about stuff that have zero relevance now instead of talking of stuff that is actually important for the story.

I didn’t play Morrowind, but I watched some LPs. This type of lore adds flavor to the gameplay if you can stop playing to read walls of text, but it would much better if it were concise and affected quests, don’t you think?

I would argue that alot of problems on many writers is that they don't have anything interesting to say.

Fixed. My pet theory is that there are two misconceptions that will ensure that most writing is bad. The first misconception is that fictional writing is mostly an exercise of imagination and manipulation of words with varied standards of style. That is, you accept as an axiom that form trumps over content. What is the corollary of this? The non-cognitive assumption that the content is entirely arbitrary since is just fiction. Since fiction is not about the real word, everything goes. Of course, both assumptions are wrong and result from a lack of understanding of the purpose of fictional writing, i.e., to provide a kind of experiential knowledge that you usually wouldn’t have in your personal life. That’s why research, life experience and some degree of verisimilitude matters in fiction, and should matter in fantasy.

Tldr: most fictional writers are bad because they don't understand the purpose of fictional writing.

 

[Ismaul]

What I wonder is ... whether the decline of standards is directly linked to women in the department or whatever.

Not at all. The decline was felt long before the recent rise of radical feminism in universities (my reference is Canada btw). Standards have first been lowered in elementary schools, on the basis that holding back students a year could lead to dropping out, arrested development, social exclusion, losing friends, etc. Everyone succeeds and graduates, even if they fail. That could be argued for, but they also stopped separating better students from weaker ones in different classes, on the same grounds, so weaker students no longer get the attention they deserve (and the stronger ones are neglected too, never to live up to their potential). Also, the budget got cut, so you have more students per class, therefore less time for teachers to spend with those that have difficulties. Plus you had waves of immigration, and to not discriminate, they lowered the standards even more. This trend has been going on for at least 20 years, I lived through some of thoses changes as I was finishing elementary school. Reform, they call it.

So you've got students coming out of elementary school with barely the skills they need for the next step, if even. And you can see how that has an impact on all further education, always behind what it was supposed to be. High school teachers everywhere see it and complain about it, but what can they do? They have to dumb down their courses, because the students do not have what it takes to learn the originally planned curriculum. And then the dumbed down courses become the new standard. This is known and well documented, in Canada at least. But this will not improve as the state continues to cut education funding. They even recently cut funding for slightly mentally challenged kids, which are now back in gen pop. This way lies madness.

This stems from leftist principles, some of them I think are defensible, but the execution is just plain abysmal, and worse than the alternative. Dragging everyone down is way worse than losing a few behind. But stupid workers slave the same for the machine, and are more likely to end up doing something manual/technical (aka useful) rather than going for higher education. And aren't there way too many people in universities anyways, they say?

The irony is that those leftist principles of non-discrimination / not leaving anyone behind lead to the opposite of what they were meant to do: people are less educated, less able to "emancipate" themselves, whatever that means.

The radical feminists that took over social studies are the product of that dumbed down generation.

I don't disagree at all that standards are often low, and more problematically, low standards are not called out because being a cranky uncompromising professor is no longer socially acceptable unless you're famous, and you're supposed to coddle your students instead of showing them why it's natural most of what they write now is shit and how they can get better.

I've struggled to purposefully improve my writing once in university, because professors just tell me "it's really great", even when I ask them what I could do to improve. In some cases, the teachers themselves being bad at the language in which they teach is to blame. That is a direct consequence of hiring for diversity, hiring abroad, rather than local. Another factor is the lowering of standards that I have talked about; students get to university with barely functional writing skills, and since scoring is a comparative process in social sciences, my ok writing comes out as one of the best. That is some bullshit.

 

[Lurker King]

Standards have first been lowered in elementary schools, on the basis that holding back students a year could lead to dropping out, arrested development, social exclusion, losing friends, etc. Everyone succeeds and graduates, even if they fail. That could be argued for, but they also stopped separating better students from weaker ones in different classes, on the same grounds, so weaker students no longer get the attention they deserve (and the stronger ones are neglected too, never to live up to their potential).

Theodore Dalrymple provides some interesting reflections about education decadence in this article, but his example is the public education in England. He is an awesome essayist, by the way.

 

[coldcrow]

For someone raised in the east bloc, I associate something very different with "leftism". Whatever other problems there were, the educational system in the east bloc was considered very good. In fact I rather think this has really nothing to do with the traditional left, it was coopted by the american "I-am-entitled" wave of genderism, gay rights, inclusiveness and whatnot.

Edit: So I rather think consumerism, liberalism and capitalism are the main reasons for the decline.

 

[Tigranes]

Ismaul, in interests of preventing quote monsters

Of course, the wider trends you note here are well known and I don't disagree. It's just odd to me that it gets linked with, say, latter-day feminism or actual postmodernist thinkers (and not gormless hyper-relativists), such that it will sometimes be argued or implied that higher education has been infiltrated by womyn supremacists that brainwash all goers into bad writing or whatever. Instead, I'd partially agree with your last sentence and say that feminism, just like other branches of the humanities, have become infested with low quality and lazy thinking glossed with self-righteousness - where the self-righteousness would merely be an annoyance, if not for the primary problem of low quality thought.

Today the training provided by universities, especially the humanities, is extremely out of sync with skills that the job market actually demands, as well as the social privilege accorded to university education. We should not aspire to have everyone go to university, and universities should not be reduced to teaching skills that they will use every day in every kind of job the world over. But at the current moment, we have far too many people who don't actually need to go to university come and waste money because of the perception that jobs demand it, then universities struggle to teach students that don't really need or want to know what it teaches. In that situation, it becomes very difficult for professors to ethically hold the highest standards and make demands of students. You know this student's writing is not good enough - but you know also that he/she doesn't really need to write better to succeed in today's world, and yet you know the price of lowering his/her grades is very high, and to boot you have the problem that you know grades inflation is everywhere anyway, and there is an increasing visibility of suicides etc. as a result of academic pressure. So we now have a clusterfuck.

I don't know how or why it happened, but there are several particularly strong enclaves of radical Marxist-Feminist dispositions in Canadian universities at the moment - e.g. Alberta. And as with any group, you can't paint them with a broad brush; sometimes you get incisive and original work that makes it refreshing they're taking a strong political stance instead of waffling, sometimes you get suffocating 'of course you're enraged too right? i'm going to preface everything i say with i'm sorry i'm a white male'.

 

[Lurker King]

For someone raised in the east bloc, I associate something very different with "leftism". Whatever other problems there were, the educational system in the east bloc was considered very good. In fact I rather think this has really nothing to do with the traditional left, it was coopted by the american "I-am-entitled" wave of genderism, gay rights, inclusiveness and whatnot.

That’s because the “new left” starts when the traditional left succeeds. If you can't complain about equal rights anymore, you fabricate a cause to give meaning to your life, with new enemies and injustices. The fact that the new-left inherits a cynic ideology from post-modernism, which was initially nihilistic in character, is even more bizarre. This explains why the “new left” has many family resemblances with fascist ideologies such as Nazism and communism. You have evil groups that are responsible for every problem in society and is your duty to wipe them off the face of the earth. Things such as falibilism, discussion about facts and exceptions are ignored. There is not concern about objectivity in it, you have groups and agendas, that’s it.

 

[Lurker King]

So I rather think consumerism, liberalism and capitalism are the main reasons for the decline.

How come? Capitalism is just the natural expression of economic necessities. Liberalism is just the acknowledgment of rights and the freedom to choose your style of life. Consumerism is a vice, just like any other. I think you are underestimating the power of ideas and intellectuals. People need to have meaning in their lives, and some will look for meaning in the most simplistic and absurd ideologies, because they are powerful. They are easy to learn, provide answers to everything and make you feel good about yourself. If anything, this tell more about the frivolity and stupidity of the intellectuals involved and the idiots who repeat their ideas. You have like a billion of interesting things to give meaning to your life, but no, you should stick to the new-left because is easier.

 

[coldcrow]

In what fucking way is the hoarding e.g. concentration of capital an economic necessity?

 

[Lurker King]

The concentration of capital is just a byproduct of economic interactions. Some individuals are more talented in providing services than others, or provide a specific type of service that is more valued by most people. The result is that they will acquire more capital. Did you ever read Nozick’s “Anarchy, State and Utopia”? Give it a try. One of the main thesis of the book is that liberty upsets patterns. If you adopt any conception of just distribution of capital, and give people the freedom to spend their capital the way they want, this will result in a disturbance of the pattern, in inequality. Why do you think football players receive fortunes? Because the system is unfair? No, because that’s the kind of entertainment that is valued the most. The only way to prevent this from happening is controlling every segment of the economy, thus making it inefficient, discouraging production of wealth and lowering the standards of living of the population.

 

[coldcrow]

Yeayea, the main difference between us is, that I think human intellect and common sense should be used to control and ultimately transform and overcome our chimpanzee ancestry. The problem is that our motivations and instincts are really ill-equipped to deal with the implications of a fast developing technology. So I always liked ideas of a realistic utopias, which were common in east bloc sci-fi. Once you resign to the capitalist egotist ways and shortsightedness, it is imho, over.

 

[Fenix]

Not at all. The decline was felt long before the recent rise of radical feminism in universities (my reference is Canada btw). Standards have first been lowered in elementary schools, on the basis that holding back students a year could lead to dropping out, arrested development, social exclusion, losing friends, etc. Everyone succeeds and graduates, even if they fail. That could be argued for, but they also stopped separating better students from weaker ones in different classes, on the same grounds, so weaker students no longer get the attention they deserve (and the stronger ones are neglected too, never to live up to their potential). Also, the budget got cut, so you have more students per class, therefore less time for teachers to spend with those that have difficulties. Plus you had waves of immigration, and to not discriminate, they lowered the standards even more. This trend has been going on for at least 20 years, I lived through some of thoses changes as I was finishing elementary school. Reform, they call it.

How interesting, as if I saw school reform in Russia, so called Unified State Exam.
Absulutely the same, except that instead immigration this reform bring people with very low education at all from the mountain regions of the Caucasus mostly, who got opportunity to go to universities, because almost all have exceptional points after those Unified State Exams in - guess what? - in Russian, while they all speak Russian with great efforts.
I call this stage Soil Preparation, Spudding.

They even recently cut funding for slightly mentally challenged kids, which are now back in gen pop.

That what happened 6-7 years ago in Russia too. Now they are teaching together with normal healthy children, they say to us that it is benefitial for mentally ill children, and we shouldn't be egoists and other such typical bullshit. Nobody tells about how it affect education of normal children.

This stems from leftist principles, some of them I think are defensible, but the execution is just plain abysmal, and worse than the alternative.

You are making huge mistake if you think that it is all just derailed by poor execution noble plan of caring for the citizens.
First they consequentially executed it for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS, all indicators of level of education hit the bottom, and this all is a mistake?
And then comes this horrible takeover that you described previously? Stage Young Growth I call it.
Mistakes of such scale and and duration do not exist.
Especailly exactly the same things going on in Russia, and if we dig, I'm absolutely sure we'll find same in Europe, though it will be difficult.

It's just odd to me that it gets linked with, say, latter-day feminism or actual postmodernist thinkers

Seriously?
People that taking a part in destruction of universities and education system using postmodern language, associated and grown from it SJW movement and it is ODD to you?

have become infested

Yeah, with one difference - it is not infection which sounds like it happened by itself, because it is metaphor, so it doesn't happened by itsef, or at least this was controlled and calculated process where the initial conditions were set.

In that situation, it becomes very difficult for professors to ethically hold the highest standards and make demands of students.

I'm reading you, and I don't understand why you try to distort discussion?
It was clearly said what ARE the real problems that make it difficult to make demands of students.
What are you describing is non exist.

Today the training provided by universities, especially the humanities, is extremely out of sync with skills that the job market actually demands, as well as the social privilege accorded to university education. We should not aspire to have everyone go to university, and universities should not be reduced to teaching skills that they will use every day in every kind of job the world over. But at the current moment, we have far too many people who don't actually need to go to university come and waste money because of the perception that jobs demand it, then universities struggle to teach students that don't really need or want to know what it teaches. In that situation, it becomes very difficult for professors to ethically hold the highest standards and make demands of students. You know this student's writing is not good enough - but you know also that he/she doesn't really need to write better to succeed in today's world, and yet you know the price of lowering his/her grades is very high, and to boot you have the problem that you know grades inflation is everywhere anyway, and there is an increasing visibility of suicides etc. as a result of academic pressure. So we now have a clusterfuck.

All bullshit you wrote, while I dismiss is exist at all in a proportion that could affect entire country, because it is mostly grounded on "he thinks-he thinks", and you can ground anything that way, so - let us assume its all true.
Tell why degradation start now or in recent years, while exactly same thing were affectin universities for centuries, from the first day of first university? If not for millenia.
Or all you described came to existence only in last 20 years.

I think all you wrote is complete bullshit, university in USSR always teached students not a practical things, but in more classical, broad approach, they worked to make a Renaissance man, with broad erudition, capable to sucseed in related areas of science, thats why thay were valued as scientist on West.
And nothing of what you described happened. Literalli zero.

 

[Tigranes]

Fenix I have no idea why you keep arguing about things I never said, maybe you just want to fight and be angry but you can't do it with a real person and their actual opinions?

It's like I say, "This is shit, and one of the consequences is it makes it difficult for professors to do their job properly", and you read, "Oh no everything is fine!!!"

I also specifically attacked the idea that all this only happened in 20 years. I specifically said these problems go back a long way. I also said that the humanities has been in trouble basically since its very institutionalisation. And then you read, "oh no this is only small problem only in recent years!!!"

 

[Naveen]

For someone raised in the east bloc, I associate something very different with "leftism". Whatever other problems there were, the educational system in the east bloc was considered very good. In fact I rather think this has really nothing to do with the traditional left, it was coopted by the american "I-am-entitled" wave of genderism, gay rights, inclusiveness and whatnot.

Edit: So I rather think consumerism, liberalism and capitalism are the main reasons for the decline.

There's also the point that what Americans call leftism requires democracy. Moral outrage and blackmail only work when there are democratic and somewhat free institutions that can be used as springboards to power, but in the Soviet Union, the party springboards you (and from their POV, those leftists were useful idiots.)

 

[Ismaul]

This stems from leftist principles, some of them I think are defensible, but the execution is just plain abysmal, and worse than the alternative.

You are making huge mistake if you think that it is all just derailed by poor execution noble plan of caring for the citizens.

I meant that the principles were co-opted by politicians who didn't care about them, and used as a rhetoric to justify cutting funding in education by way of "reforms". This was no mistake on their part, but voluntary sabotage.

 

[Lurker King]

Yeayea, the main difference between us is, that I think human intellect and common sense should be used to control and ultimately transform and overcome our chimpanzee ancestry. The problem is that our motivations and instincts are really ill-equipped to deal with the implications of a fast developing technology. So I always liked ideas of a realistic utopias, which were common in east bloc sci-fi. Once you resign to the capitalist egotist ways and shortsightedness, it is imho, over.

But utopias in general, not just ideal communism, are destined to fail. They are conceived based on preferences and ideas of one single individual. In order to work, you need to kill, mutilate or throw in jail everyone who disagrees with you. I always got the impression that utopia authors are like an architect who designs a building without windows, and think that everyone who disagrees with him and wants windows is wrong. It wasn't Orwell who said that "Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”? Utopias are unimaginative and provincial because no single individual can possibly plan and anticipate every single service, need and human preference. Society is a gigantic entity filled with different individuals and needs. Let them figure it out by themselves what they want. The result will be better. The state should weigh in to ensure social order and respect for contracts, nothing more.

The failures of communism have nothing to do with egoism. The problem is the need to control every aspect of the lives of individuals to ensure that the order is being respected. This ensues the corruption and incompetence associated with the bureaucracy created to ensure this control, the lack of incentives to create wealth (why should I work If I will not be properly compensated for this), etc. Utopias of control are based on the delusion that you can improve people’s lives by taking their liberty, which reveals lack of basic understanding of how wealth and prosperity are created in the first place.

 

[DeepOcean]

Problem for humanities is that they lack a standard for falsifiability, a professor can come with a theory: "Sexism and racism is reinforced by microagression so if you stop said such microagressions by censuring people you manage to change the counciousness of society as time passes and end racism." , on reality, the contrary could be easily be the truth and people become so annoyed with you that if they were racists, they become even more and if they were not, they will become. It could be that racism and sexism are just skewed interpretations of real communication from this professor and what he sees as sexism is not. How you gonna prove or disprove it?

Then come the emotionaly unstable people that are more looking for any theory that gives them an identity doesn't matter how false it than knowing the truth, making any honest discussion impossible and the result is a mess with no end in sight. If you are this professor, even if you manage to discover your idea is false, so many people used it for their emotional needs that if you challenge them they will eat you alive that you prefer to not bother them and pretend you are doing honest intellectual work.

 

[Lurker King]

There is a bunch of studies showing how people tend to be much more irrational in politic discussions than in any other subject. For instance, one study suggests that people react to political disagreement as a personal attack. So even if you have some decent standards, you can still be subject to this irrationality; if you have no standards at all, you become a fanatic. I think that some influential individuals working with these topics have serious mental issues, which in turn make them students become equally disturbed. I won't give any names, because I don't want to give them any publicity.

 

[Israfael]

About post soviet space - you don't get it because our left is not liberal. What is called liberal in the US is actually right wing here. And i still think people tend to overestimate SJW factor here, it's just games gradually became 'cool' thing to do, while they were stuff of nerds in the 90ies/80ies, also requiring some tech knowledge to run (and even cheap pc costed like 5x more then). Now the devs have to strive for the lowest common denominator to survive even in KS niche (just remember comments in poe/numanuma kickstarter comment feeds)

 

[Charles Eli Cheese]

There is a bunch of studies showing how people tend to be much more irrational in politic discussions than in any other subject. For instance, one study suggests that people react to political disagreement as a personal attack. So even if you have some decent standards, you can still be subject to this irrationality; if you have no standards at all, you become a fanatic. I think that some influential individuals working with these topics have serious mental issues, which in turn make them students become equally disturbed. I won't give any names, because I don't want to give them any publicity.

It's classic paranoid projection. They only went into shit like that in the first place because they have an axe to grind, and so to them anyone who disagrees is ebul nazi blah blah. But the ones they accuse this of are not the ones staging protests and using 'activism' to attack everyone but themselves.

 

[Charles Eli Cheese]

The classical sitcom was structured so that one could watch any of its episodes in any order and have no problem understanding what was going on. Thus, producers reasoned, they would avoid alienating more casual viewers and maximize ratings. Sometime around the 2000s, for reasons which I won't go into here, that began to change. Continuity and the resulting increased complexity in storytelling and worldbuilding became acceptable, even valuable as a source of potential licensing opportunities.

Melodrama is the easiest and cheapest thing possible to write, that is the whole reason they do it. Comedy, scifi etc. all require a strong concept for each episode, that's why those things are always shit today. Rest of article can just be skipped.

 

[cpmartins]

Well, someone agrees with Roxor.
https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/825906177867337728