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

[Ismaul]

Edit: esprit d'escalier

Furthermore: once you've figured out what cows eat, you get possibilities for stuff that directly affects gameplay. Do we have free peasants owning their own cows? Are they owned by the village collectively? Are they property of a feudal lord and the villagers just take care of them for him? And... why would somebody want to burn somebody else's barn? What would the consequences be? Without hay, the cows will starve over the winter, and they would have to be slaughtered, which means ruin, whether it's for a peasant, a village, or a lord. You could have a whole series of quests around barn-burning: perhaps you'll be doing the burning, or catching the firebug, or trying to break a vicious cycle of barn-burning between hostile villages, threatening to plunge the entire region into famine. All this from figuring out what cows eat.

But-but, you're going at this in reverse, no? The game is what the players does, so you need to focus on that, and create the worldbuilding framework to support it, not the other way around. Otherwise you end up with some nice lore, your own little beautiful baby, and since you can't/won't kill it and you don't have a good editor to tell you to man up and cut it, you end up shoving it in our faces.

The usual process is more like this IMO: you want to create a farming setting game. You think about what kind of conflicts the player will be dragged into and have to do something about. That can be about food and resources and rival famers and shit if you want to drive home that your setting is authentic. And then you research farms and cows, worldbuild the details and create a scenario that is enhanced/more authentic because of that.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I find cultural appropriation of Tolstoi works outrageous. Darth Roxor literally rapes russian culture in order to illustrate his point. He shoudl've used Przybyszewski instead.

 

[Prime Junta]

If the lore is already well integrated, sure you could still have more optional lore. But then you could make the argument that, if there's more lore, why not integrate it in the game itself? And if it's not worth doing so, then maybe ask yourself why should it be there at all? This is the value of editing, not wasting the player's time. Saying that the writers need some place to lore dump otherwise they'll dump it in our faces really makes me think that what they need is an editor.

Eh, I don't feel particularly strongly about this. I just think lorebooks are (1) easily ignorable and (2) occasionally interesting. That is, they don't do much harm even if they're bad, and they can do a little bit of good if they're not. I wouldn't miss them if an editor just removed all of them as a last pass.

Priorities are important of course; there's no point working out the family trees of every peasant in the village if they're not pertinent to anything. The trick is to use different scales for different things. If your game is set in a backwoods province somewhere, you don't need to work out imperial court etiquette or exactly how the imperial postal system works, but you do need to know that the satrap owes fealty to the emperor, and you might need to know that it takes on average two weeks for messages to be passed back and forth between him and the capital. Conversely, if you're actually in a village, it might be very important to know what the cows eat.

I.e., go with broad strokes and general structures for the big picture, then flesh out the stuff you actually interact with in obsessive detail -- and most importantly, make sure that all these different levels of detail stay coherent. If somebody nails an imperial edict to the church door, you need to have some idea of how it got there. You don't need to explain any of it, but it does have to make sense.

 

[Kaivokz]

TLRD pls?

Unfortunately, I think this article is likely to have much less impact that Roxor's review of PoE, which I know was widely read among RPG developers, because it contains a mix of broad empirical claims unsupported by empirical evidence and because it raises subjective complaints that are not amenable to easy solution. "Unskilled people at the wheel" is a good example of this.

Are the complaints merely unfounded (lacking cited evidence) or are they subjective?

To quote Roxor:

All this is made even more prominent by post-modern sensibilities, according to which nothing can really be judged or evaluated, because the problem leading to something being bad is always due to some nebulous, unchangeable reason

There are such things as lousy writers, poorly told stories, and badly written lines.

A few people have said that the second section of the editorial was superfluous--or even detrimental--but I think Roxor actually makes his most important claims there. Including the above jab at the relation between "post-modernism" and relativity, and also this:

For old science fiction, the majority of the authors were scientists – physicists, chemists, physicians, etc. For fantasy, you will often stumble upon linguists, historians and philosophers.

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.​

 

[Prime Junta]

But-but, you're going at this in reverse, no? The game is what the players does, so you need to focus on that, and create the worldbuilding framework to support it, not the other way around. Otherwise you end up with some nice lore, your own little beautiful baby, and since you can't/won't kill it and you don't have a good editor to tell you to man up and cut it, you end up shoving it in our faces.

It goes both ways. Sure you have a basic idea of what you want the story to be about and what you want the player to do. You also need a basic idea of where you want the game to be set. Then you start working at it from both ends. As it starts knotting together, the setting will suggest things that modify the story and gameplay, and, conversely, you'll need to find ways to justify story and gameplay elements in the setting. And always you need to maintain the microscope/telescope approach.

Thing with RPGs is that a lot of what the player does isn't directly related to the main story arc. Sidequests. These are there to give the player an illusion of freedom, to flesh out the setting, and to bring the world to life. They most naturally arise from stuff that's just happening in the world because of the way the world works: an ogre made off with a farmer's pigs, a porn studio is looking for fresh meat, a bunch of orcs don't like their working conditions and want to unionise. Without coherent worldbuilding this becomes just "fetch me 20 wolf skins." With it, they become little stories in their own right, which brings the whole thing to life.

 

[Ismaul]

Prime Junta
Basically, we agree. Setting research can indeed suggest gameplay elements or a way to design/present them that drives the themes/setting home. Ultimately though, worldbuilding is there to serve the gameplay.

Thing with RPGs is that a lot of what the player does isn't directly related to the main story arc. Sidequests. These are there to give the player an illusion of freedom, to flesh out the setting, and to bring the world to life. They most naturally arise from stuff that's just happening in the world because of the way the world works: an ogre made off with a farmer's pigs, a porn studio is looking for fresh meat, a bunch of orcs don't like their working conditions and want to unionise. Without coherent worldbuilding this becomes just "fetch me 20 wolf skins." With it, they become little stories in their own right, which brings the whole thing to life.

Agreed. But I'd say that RPGs where there is a main story arc and where a lot of what you do isn't tied at all to it or its conflicts is just a shit game. I'd rather there were next to no sidequests at all (ex: AoD) than drowning in them and asking myself when will the main quest begin and how many sidequest-dumpers must I evade before what I do as a player/character makes even remotely sense (ex: BG2 - stranger-hero asked by old ladies to help them shopping, do couples counseling, etc.).

 

[Bumvelcrow]

This is an excellent, insightful, thought-provoking read and not as bitchy as I was anticipating, he said, nodding approvingly while flicking the remains of a hummus sandwich onto the floor, returning it to it's prior state of filthitude from before the cleaners, stooped and slouching, like hairless orang-utans, had made their ineffectual, sluggish rounds. The sky was grey, as though water was suspended in the air, and somewhere a pigeon made pigeon-noises in a most pigeon-like fashion. It resembled no less than a pigeon.

It'll take some time to process, but it was well worth the ride. I hope somebody publicises this more widely.

 

[Prime Junta]

Ultimately though, worldbuilding is there to serve the gameplay.

Or is the gameplay there to bring the world to life? For me they're two ends of a rope, you can't really say which one's more important.

 

[Haba]

This thread is clearly not autistic enough, needs more diagrams

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

This article reeks of hybris, if hybris could rot.
If Darth Roxor is so smart, why doesn't he make write his own RPG? Checkmate, nerdling.

ps: I've read the entire thing. Good read.

 

[Lurker King]

but what I've noticed recently is that a lot of the kids in university now (and the younger faculty as well), are actually too dumb for deconstruction.

Assuming that there is anything remotely sophisticated about deconstructionism in the first place. *shrug* It's a retraded theory made by charlatans with obscure prose. Nothing more.

 

[felipepepe]

So your alternative to retarded pretentious cRPGs are pretentious ready-mades with RPG-maker-jRPG-looks? Your false dilema is really depressing, Felipepepe. Please, don't tell me you really believe in this.

I think you kind of missed felipe's point there, man. I mean, have you tried the game?

If a game with as low budget and pretentious as Undertale can do it, why not other games (and especially this so-called Kickstarter RPGs of 'Renaissance' era)? Undertale expanded upon old JRPGs way of conveying characters's 'voice' by giving different characters different 'voice' and, in some cases, different font. As suggested by Darth Roxor, this utilization of different fonts and graphics features (and clever use of audio) might help with presenting the narratives in a way that won't hinder the gameplay (as in the case of Undertale).

In no way this means felipe (or even me) suggesting we should have more Undertale (like you seem to thought with that post), but developers of our beloved pretentious western cRPGs should learn a thing or two from how Undertale, with all of its pretentiousness, utilize different fonts and graphics features (AND maybe even creatively design appropriate audio for different characters, not just different situation and/or different areas/city/hubs), as to not how writings and narrative getting the way of gameplay.

The Order: 1886 is a game by a frustrated movie director wannabe who wanted to make an interactive movie but had to put in some pesky gameplay "because it's a game". So he added shooting & QTEs, the lowest-common denominator. In this context, many RPGs are to books what The Order: 1886 is to movies - they try to cram concepts from in a totally different media. The goddamn mouse-over in Tyranny is nothing but a glorified footnote, FFS!

A game like PoE will go "...said the vampire, in a maniacal tone, filled with blood lust", while Bloodlines will just use a bloodied font. Undertale would not only use the font, but completely change the music to fit the tone. Think about that, how many RPGs change music mid-dialog to express mood? Almost none! And it has been 30 years since FFVI blew everyone's mind with stuff like Dancing Mad!

Of course, there's also the issue of people being locked into roles - Toby Fox could make Undertale because he did the whole fucking game - he wrote and designer each character, so he could go "I'll call him Papyrus and use a Papyrus font in his dialog" an compose music that matched each character's personality perfectly.

 

[Elwro]

As for War and Peace, remember that a third of it is the post-hegelian historicist bullshit, and can be safely skipped on first reading.

 

[Prime Junta]

A game like PoE will go "...said the vampire, in a maniacal tone, filled with blood lust",

(citation needed)

T:ToN is guilty of this big time. Pillars, by and large, isn't. Dialogue is just dialogue with no tacked-on descriptive text.

(Except Durance and GM which are in fact filled with this kind of verbiage.)

 

[Darth Roxor]

And here we go

Literature-degree-holder

You dare insult me so, knave? Pistols at dawn.

For example "citation needed" and "weasel words" tags are probably required

See: Disclaimer #4

Also, it's tragic that the lag time for publishing this article is so long because the Tyranny jab really should be updated with the guys' admission that he doesn't actually read.

Yeah, I was actually thinking about making last-minute adjustments to squeeze that bit in, but if I kept adding relevant bits all the time as they appeared, this thing would never be finished.

how do you feel about the extensive use of rhetorical questions in long articles about good writing?

The main thing I took from it though is that my linguistics PhD would be better used for video game writing than research.

Linguistics pride worldwide

This whole part is kinda citiation needed-tier. Postmodernism is not all that relevant anymore in literature departments and it certainly isn't on the contemporary book market. Why its importance is sometimes so overemphasized probably has a lot to do with the politization on universities in recent years, when postmodern sensibilities became a strawman for the alt-right. Perhaps its more relevant in certain social science departments (genderstudieslol; which incidentally you mention, so thats probably where the argument comes from) but for literature, I don't think so, not when it comes to quality judgements.

The thing is that mentioning "postmodernism" there is rather unfortunate and I'm not very happy with it myself, but I was struggling to find a moniker for any approximation or equivalent to what I was referring to and couldn't really find it. Another one that comes to mind is "librul insanity" or the like, but obviously that's even more "citation needed" than "postmodernism".

It's something that Ludo Lense also pointed out to me in the content forum where I posted the first draft. My problem remains that in a very very broad and warped sense those ARE issues that relate to post-modernism, but even so, the post-modernism of today has so very little to do with the original post-modern movement, it's hard to equate the two, and I'm afraid that until some sort of post-post-modernism term is invented, our hands are a bit tied here.

Also, to be absolutely fair, Chapter 2 of this article was the hardest to formulate for me, and I also think it still shows, but I've re-written it 2 or 3 times to give it the most coherence I could (including some total overhauls of a few points), and eventually I grew to hate looking over it so much that I just left it in its current form and said "come what may".

Personally, I believe that the series that does it best is (sigh) Dark Souls

This is something I've heard as well when writing this, but my experience with Dark Souls is roughly 2 or 3 hours before uninstalling, and I prefer not to touch on things I have no real idea about.

- Very quickly got bored of what amounted to bitching about "ivory tower elites" or the vague equivalent.

That would be true if those ivory tower people were elites. The point is that they are ivory tower cretins.

- Bitching about "stage direction" and text descriptions of facial expressions and emotional states in isometric games... and then effectively saying the only way around this is full voice acting in first person? Well... yeah. No shit. Budgets, eh?

Is redding teh hard? Where do I say it's the only way around it?
There should be no "way around this", my point is that those things should just not be there, period. To put it into an example, imagine I'm an NPC in a CRPG and you're a protag. You share your misinformed opinion with me, and I respond:

" 'Is redding teh hard?' answered Roxorowski sarcastically/raising an eyebrow/twisting his mouth with disgust like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino."

Is all that stuff after the quotation necessary? Is it not absolutely obvious that I'd be doing all that stuff after what I said? The same is true for " 'Yes,' he nods" and " 'No,' he shakes his head". All of this is deadweight that adds nothing to the in-game texts because it's obvious that the character is doing this, unless you are a social retard who can't read the intent of someone's message on the Internet unless it comes with a smiley face.

Ironically, the article itself suffers from some of the same faults – a good editor would've snipped the rant about creative writers and English majors ruining everything; it's a digression which adds nothing and distracts from the meat of the text.

Actually, when I'd showed it to root, he said that the section should probably be axed because it's only tangentially related and distracting. But personally I think there are at least a few points there that are near-critical to the matter at hand, and I couldn't really catapult them anywhere else, so it stayed (see also my reply to SausageInYourFace).

I'd say Kaivokz 's post is a great addendum to that part, and it highlights all the important stuff that I wanted to convey through it.

Cows & world-buildan

My problem with the whole cow debacle is that it's a stupid thing that shouldn't even be taken into consideration for longer than 5 minutes. You have cows, you have grass, cows eat grass. It's basically 1+1=2, and giving it any further attention is either pointless re-invention of the wheel, or equally pointless fragmentarisation that amounts to 0.3+0.6+0.1+(2x0.5)=2. Again, compare to Fallout, where your cows have two heads and you have little to no grass.

When it comes to gameplay matters stemming from what cows eat: look no further than to the game The Horde!, which also happens to be based 100% on the most basic "You have cows, you have grass, cows eat grass, 1+1=2".

What kind of mention about Journals that doesnt even mention both Planescape Torment and Arcanum?

I meant journals left around by characters for the playa to read, not the thing that pops up when you press J.

 

[Ludo Lense]

A part of informed criticism is also to give credit where credit is due, and that, Roxor still needs to learn.

Absolutely not. This is one of the worst possible ideas that permeates criticism in any media these days. Some people think there needs to be some sort of inherent "balance" in criticism from an ontological point of view. It is a perfectly valid approach to make a purely negative analysis of a work.

 

[felipepepe]

Agree, although it will make it easy for people to ignore it and dismiss as trolling.

 

[Elwro]

Thanks, DR. That was a great read.

Really. What lets you picture the evil in the bronze age is all about modern ideas, at best from the 19th century, and ones which are also ridiculously common, if not even omnipresent? Have you even tried to read a single history or mythology handbook to ancient Greece? The amount of genuine evil and disregard for humanity you can find there is enough to fill a whole series of Tyranny games, spanning over ten games. Here’s an excerpt that I’ve always particularly liked from the work by Jan Parandowski, an early 20th century Polish archeologist and writer. This is how he describes Mycenae:


All this happened in Mycenae, a grim castle protected by walls made from cyclopean stones. Surrounded by naked, rust-coloured mountains, as if stained with blood, ruled by hard-hearted, gold-grubbing kings. None of them would die a natural death, for they would all perish from sword, dagger or poison, and return to haunt the royal tombs as wraiths. These bloody phantoms would come out at night, clad in shining armour, golden masks and breastplates, and crimson cloaks embellished with golden plates. To appease these glittering horrors, generous sacrifices had to be made on their graves, while blood was to be given to them to drink – the same blood that they spilled so gladly whilst they still lived.

 

[Infinitron]

I meant journals left around by characters for the playa to read, not the thing that pops up when you press J.

I believe there are a few of those in PS:T.

 

[Prime Junta]

Absolutely not. This is one of the worst possible ideas that permeates criticism in any media these days. Some people think there needs to be some sort of inherent "balance" in criticism from an ontological point of view. It is a perfectly valid approach to make a purely negative analysis of a work.

Sure. But if in the same breath you complain about "all discourses are equally valid" postmodernism, you're being mightily inconsistent. I'm more of a "wie es eigentlich gewesen" guy myself.

 

[Lurker King]

The Order: 1886 is a game by a frustrated movie director wannabe who wanted to make an interactive movie but had to put in some pesky gameplay "because it's a game". So he added shooting & QTEs, the lowest-common denominator. In this context, many RPGs are to books what The Order: 1886 is to movies - they try to cram concepts from in a totally different media. The goddamn mouse-over in Tyranny is nothing but a glorified footnote, FFS!

A game like PoE will go "...said the vampire, in a maniacal tone, filled with blood lust", while Bloodlines will just use a bloodied font. Undertale would not only use the font, but completely change the music to fit the tone. Think about that, how many RPGs change music mid-dialog to express mood? Almost none! And it has been 30 years since FFVI blew everyone's mind with stuff like Dancing Mad!

Of course, there's also the issue of people being locked into roles - Toby Fox could make Undertale because he did the whole fucking game - he wrote and designer each character, so he could go "I'll call him Papyrus and use a Papyrus font in his dialog" an compose music that matched each character's personality perfectly.

Look, while I accept your criticism towards these retarded attempts to make cRPGs into books, that doesn’t mean that it is always a bad idea. PS:T vomits text all over the place, but is interesting. They are trying something similar with Triple-A games, namely, imitating Hollywood movies, but you also have some interesting experiences because of that, e.g., God of War. I think the problem is not that they are importing features from other genres, but how they do this. It’s obvious to me that games are first and foremost attempts to surpass challenges, so no matter how cinematic or heavy-text the game experience is, you need challenge. So the complaints about the narrative structure are misguided if the only problem is the execution. Of course, you could insist that there are other problems that are intrinsic to these structures and you would be probably right. But the solution to verbose writing is less writing, not breaking the wall.

I think that Undertale can be an interesting example of experimentation, but nothing more than. The whole game is designed around breaking the wall, and while this can interesting for theoretical reasons and design talk, it suck as a game and as a concept for a game. I suspect that you are so burnout of traditional cRPG design and their tried-and-true formulas, that you are more welcoming to these kind of games. But I think you need to be really careful when you praise these kind of games, because they can open the door to even more pretentious developers that want to fulfil their failed artistic ambitions at the expenses of the genre.

 

[Lurker King]

I would like to recommend this book:

"These days, discussions of writing style are generally limited to superficialities such as serial commas and approved abbreviations. It's a pity. While consistency in writing does make for more pleasant reading, no amount of rule-abiding can mask poorly wrought prose. In Clear and Simple As the Truth, Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner argue that "writing is an intellectual activity, not a bundle of skills." The first half of their book is a probing examination of classic style, the form popularized by 17th-century French prose writers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Madame de Sévigné and best typified contemporarily by much of the writing in the pre-1985 New Yorker. The authors liken classic style to those theorems in mathematics valued for being "brief, efficient, clear, elegant, and pure." The classic sentence appears effortless, "as if it could have been written in no other way," and while "the writer may speak with a technical mastery not possessed by the reader ... his attitude is always that the reader lacks this mastery only accidentally." While one can hardly hope to distill the essence of classic style into a sentence, Thomas and Turner describe it most succinctly as expression that is "clear and simple as the truth, but no clearer or simpler."

The second half of the book is a "museum" of classic prose, by Thomas Jefferson, Descartes, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Richard Feynman, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, and many others, accompanied by commentary from the authors".

 

[Brancaleone]

That would be true if those ivory tower people were elites. The point is that they are ivory tower cretins.

I get the feeling (just muh feeling) that when it comes to ivory tower cretins and CRPG writing there are usually two conflicting impulses: 1) looking for cheap shortcuts, and thus seeing writing as an easy and undemanding way to get a surrogate for the videogame's strengths; 2) vanity, because I do art, not just videogames, and writing is very very art, and more writing means more art and me more artiste.

Since it's ivory tower cretins we are talking about, the execution of the two previous tendencies will be heavily affected by a yuge yuge lot of Dunning–Kruger effect, and there you go.

 

[Cosmo]

Whereas most RPGs are like novels, I take the Souls series as poetry (strong imagery loosely connected by archetype-based plots at best and simply being expressionist at its least coherent). The thing is, recently I've come to believe that games as a medium are actually generally better at being poems than at being novels

Actually, if we had to choose a correct, basic point of reference for CRPG writing, i'd rather pick theatre : even in its written form, words are destined to serve and mesh with action, when similarly games are about player's active influence (RPGs being no exception).

Some random points illustrating this :
- theatre shows us that exposition ("loredumps"in the case of RPGs) can be conveyed by action and dynamic writing (dynamic because it's destined to be spoken)
- written theatre has descriptions in the form of stage directions ; similarly non-dialog writing in CRPGs should be limited to its express purpose, and the gratuitous, flowery, or redundant in that case should be expunged because it takes us away from the action.

...

I 'd partially disagree because in this frame of reference, writing has a value in and of itself, whereas in RPGs, writing is just an element among others serving a bigger purpose, that stands outside of it.

 

[Ludo Lense]

Sure. But if in the same breath you complain about "all discourses are equally valid" postmodernism, you're being mightily inconsistent. I'm more of a "wie es eigentlich gewesen" guy myself.

That is a bit of smoke and mirrors mate.

The issue mentioned in regards to nu-postmodernism here is one of quality. That the quality of a perspective being irrelevant to due being someone's expression.

Mine was a purely ontological remark: Balance being treated as a positive in criticism, as if it improves the quality of the work, is is wrong. Whether it is a purely positive, negative or somewhere in between work of criticism, the quality lies solely with the text itself, not its chosen approach.

I have no idea why you quote Ranke, notice the "Editorial" bit in the title. If all criticism followed the "wie es eigentlich gewesen" principle then it would be insanely boring.

Also huge tangential nitpick. I always sigh when I see that phrase due the missing verb, it should be "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist". I know the removal of verbs is meant to turn it rhetorical but I still don't like it.

pretentious

Speaking of using words without knowing that they mean: Stop calling Undertale pretentious. This isn't solely aimed at you but the usage of this word is 80% wrong when I see it used.

Pretentious is related to pretend. It implies dishonesty and being disingenuous.

Undertale is one of the most honest and personal games ever made. If someone doesn't like it then they can use words like "sappy" or "saccharine" but pretentious is just plain wrong. Here is a proper usage.

"Bioshock is pretentious due to superficially using Objectivism to cloak a game about shooting and zapping across an underwater city".