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

[Prime Junta]

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.

If you intentionally omit the bad, you're not writing a review, you're writing a puff piece.

If you intentionally omit the good, you're not writing a review, you're writing a hatchet job.

Both are lies of omission.

If you have no problem with one or both of these, it means that you're totally cool with a reviewer who knowingly lies about the thing he's reviewing.

And many people are. They don't care about striving for truth and objectivity, as long as whatever they read panders to their own prejudices and preferences. That is the worm eating at not only trivial shit like game reviews, but the very core of our culture and civilisation. We just don't care anymore: if it's entertaining and confirms our own biases, it's all good.

This is my problem with mainstream (game) reviews -- they're nothing more than puff pieces, a lot of the time. And that's why I have little respect for equally one-sided hatchet pieces, however entertainingly written. They're equally dishonest and therefore equally worthless.

 

[Ismaul]

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.

Well, it's a game, innit?
You can have a good game with shit worldbuilding if the gameplay's good, but without good gameplay you just have nicely dressed shit.

Gameplay is an essential feature of games alone, while worldbuilding is nice but secondary, and can be expressed in different media.

 

[Rhuantavan]

I've read it all, and it only adds to my belief that BaK is the best RPG of all time.

 

[Lurker King]

Undertale is one of the most honest and personal games ever made.

And that’s exactly why is ridiculously pretentious. I don’t want the developer popping his head all the time to talk directly to me and remind me how smart he is for deconstructing cRPG established features. The only thing worse than superficial individuals with delusions of depth are postmodernist experiments with delusions of innovation and artsy individualism.

 

[Lurker King]

Well, it's a game, innit?
You can have a good game with shit worldbuilding if the gameplay's good, but without good gameplay you just have nicely dressed shit.

Gameplay is an essential feature of games alone, while worldbuilding is nice but secondary, and can be expressed in different media.

Well, I think is more complicated than that innit? First of all, it’s not just a game, but a specific type of game. cRPGs provide an experience in which your choices are restricted by abstract systems that try to imitate features of the real world, like stats and skills, and the challenge is directly tied to this. So I suppose that you can’t just toss any retarded setting and story you want and call it a day, because they pretend to provide some sort of imitation of reality, at least to a certain degree. In fact, in most cases what affects gameplay is not excessive realism, but lack of it. It’s lack of realism that allows you to be overpowered, abuse the system or have no decent challenge (from resource management, to decebt fights). I think some people here are jumping on the fuck-writers bandwagon just trying to preach their irrationalist theories.

 

[Ismaul]

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.

Agreed. But, from an ontological point of view? Don't you mean epistemic?
"This isn't solely aimed at you but the usage of this word is 80% wrong when I see it used."

If you intentionally omit the bad, you're not writing a review, you're writing a puff piece.

If you intentionally omit the good, you're not writing a review, you're writing a hatchet job.

Both are lies of omission.

But Roxor's editorial wasn't a review, was it? It was a critique. It didn't aim at a balanced position, but as a counterpoint to mainstream assumptions.

 

[Roguey]

Somebody should ask Faergus about self loathing. Doesn't mean it's actually gonna happen.

 

[Lurker King]

And since hack writers just don’t know when to stop expanding the world into even more eras and continents, and because they are disproportionally proud of their work, there is a lot of backstory to dump there. Yet as their worlds keep growing, even more problems arise as the writers take each element of their work under scrutiny and realise that they forgot to define something. Once this happens, the time comes to reinvent the wheel and make sure that the fantasitis also creeps into mundane world logic. Take, for instance, the writers of Obsidian’s Tyranny

​

So I decided to read the interview and here is what I find:

For my own interpretation of the question ‘What if evil won?’, I’ve always assumed the answer would be ‘sounds like real life.’ (...) I’ve found most of my inspiration comes from non-fiction: fascism, American exceptionalism, drug cartels, capitalist corporations, and militaries through the ages have all provided a great deal of inspiration as to how evil wins.

That's god, pure gold. You can't make that shit up.

 

[Neanderthal]

Gotta agree wi Roxor, terminal case o verbal diarrhea in game writin. Need to remember KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, lay strong, simple foundations an let complexity grow out on em, like simple melodies that make up a Beethoven symphony, phrases that Shakespeare popularised or seemingly straightforward quest in post apocalyptic settin o Fallout.

Instead of sayin to a suspicious husband who suspects hes bein cuckolded by his wife that she is too upset by his distrust an maybe she is feigning outrage to throw her husband off the scent an protect her lover, simply have Iago mutter, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much."

 

[Prime Junta]

But Roxor's editorial wasn't a review, was it? It was a critique. It didn't aim at a balanced position, but as a counterpoint to mainstream assumptions.

I was responding to Ludo's views on reviews in general, it wasn't about this piece anymore. Tangent.

 

[DrDigej]

The obvious answer is that lots of people also happen to eat at McDonald’s and you don’t really see them complain.

Ex cuse me! But I have personally seen 2 joints going from good cheezeburgers to absolute fucking shite. Damn right I went and complained.

 

[Jazz_]

Even Tolstoj has shit prose now? what? holy crap the codex sometimes.

 

[DrDigej]

Also gaym riting loooooooo00000000000ooool retards.

 

[Lurker King]

But Roxor's editorial wasn't a review, was it? It was a critique. It didn't aim at a balanced position, but as a counterpoint to mainstream assumptions.

I guess the word you want is "harsh" or "overly critical". Whether the critic should be too harsh or not should be determined by the evidence about the issue and the prevailing opinions about the subject. If you have only criticisms to make, nothing positive to say, or if the prevailing dogma is overly positive, you are entitled to be harsh.

 

[Azrael the cat]

This whole part is kinda citiation needed-tier. Postmodernism is not all that relevant anymore in literature departments

Look through the course-list of any english department in America and you'll find dozens of classes devoted to postmodernism/deconstruction/post-historicism/critical theory/etc...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. The incredibly politically passionate, and they've memorized by rote the sentiments of all the fashionable (or once fashionable) french writers through professors/second literature--they just have no real, direct understanding of the texts. Maybe this is just my own experience at university, but I can't imagine their isn't a similar trend of mediocrity+politics going on elsewhere.

politization on universities in recent years, when postmodern sensibilities became a strawman for the alt-right.

The claim that humanities studies at universities has gone astray isn't a recent criticism by alt-righters--it's neither recent nor a criticism made exclusively by conservatives.

Course readers have a lot to do with that. If could change one thing at Australian universities, it would be ban all course readers from humanities departments.

They were introduced because students were understandably complaining that the cost of buying all these books was really high, and the library copies were often booked out. Ok, the latter part of that complaint was always bullshit - there was always a copy of each text on each reading list in the 'library reserve' (where you can only borrow for a couple of hours at a time - enough to read a couple of chapters and then let someone else have a go).

The idea was that you'd have the 'major bits' to be discussed in the lectures provided in one free photocopy-friendly course reader, and students would still go and read the full books themselves. Like fuck that was ever going to happen.

If there was one guaranteed benefit from a humanities degree, it's that you'd spent a few years reading a lot of books from cover to cover. Course readers killed that, and it's a bigger blow than any ideological shift. If students just read the whole goddamn book, cover to cover - and it was never that hard to do, you're talking, what, 3-4 books per 6 month unit, so maybe 12-16 if you're doing full-time humanities? Sounds like a lot at first glimpse in a 4 month teaching term, but that's why humanities courses have such low contact hours - 12-14 hrs per week, compared to, say, 30, for engineering. It's because you're supposed to spend the other 15 hours reading.

 

[Turjan]

I've read the whole piece, and I agree with most of it. It's very well written. I say this as someone who is actually very lenient regarding lore dumps and overlong dialogs. I even read in-game books and don't mind at all if they pull me out of the action for a while. I like the occasional change of pace. I'm playing PoE at the moment, and I can see some of it in there. When one of the lore books used the word "socio-economic" (I kid you not), I could only role my eyes. I haven't seen this kind of language anywhere else in the actual game.

One thing I think the review got factually wrong: flour moths have caterpillars. Maggots are the larvae of (carrion) flies and - often enough - eat liquefied rotten meat. You find them on carcasses and festering wounds. At least for me, the image that the writer wanted to evoke was clear. Of course, that doesn't change the general criticism of that overwritten piece of exposition.

 

[Lurker King]

GR: Are there any plans for extended lore? I need more of those short stories, especially about Crow Trap and the Trap Gang.

Kirsch: Thanks! A friend of mine read “Under New Management” and described the Trap Gang as human jackals. I was pleased that it read that way.

 

[Ismaul]

Well, it's a game, innit?
You can have a good game with shit worldbuilding if the gameplay's good, but without good gameplay you just have nicely dressed shit.

Gameplay is an essential feature of games alone, while worldbuilding is nice but secondary, and can be expressed in different media.

Well, I think is more complicated than that innit? First of all, it’s not just a game, but a specific type of game. cRPGs provide an experience in which your choices are restricted by abstract systems that try to imitate features of the real world, like stats and skills, and the challenge is directly tied to this. So I suppose that you can’t just toss any retarded setting and story you want and call it a day, because they pretend to provide some sort of imitation of reality, at least to a certain degree. In fact, in most cases what affects gameplay is not excessive realism, but lack of it. It’s lack of realism that allows you to be overpowered, abuse the system or have no decent challenge (from resource management, to decebt fights). I think some people here are jumping on the fuck-writers bandwagon just trying to preach their irrationalist theories.

I admit you got a point about RPGs trying to simulate a particular reality, which would require a minimum of worldbuilding. I was talking more about games in general in this context though, a media for which gameplay is central.

You're reading a bit much into it btw, I'm actually a storyfag, which is why lore-dumping is such an issue for me. Story is what you do, not what others tell you happened.

 

[Elwro]

Even Tolstoj has shit prose now? what? holy crap the codex sometimes.

Tolstoy was, of course, a genius. But have you read War and Peace in particular? The historicist chapters really haven't aged well. People seem to remember the adventures of Natasha and Andrei, but for Tolstoy himself it seems the historicist parts were essential to the book.

Short stories, though -- nothing short of amazing.

(remember also that on the Codex everything is shit)

 

[Ludo Lense]

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.

If you intentionally omit the bad, you're not writing a review, you're writing a puff piece.

If you intentionally omit the good, you're not writing a review, you're writing a hatchet job.

Both are lies of omission.

If you have no problem with one or both of these, it means that you're totally cool with a reviewer who knowingly lies about the thing he's reviewing.

And many people are. They don't care about striving for truth and objectivity, as long as whatever they read panders to their own prejudices and preferences. That is the worm eating at not only trivial shit like game reviews, but the very core of our culture and civilisation. We just don't care anymore: if it's entertaining and confirms our own biases, it's all good.

This is my problem with mainstream (game) reviews -- they're nothing more than puff pieces, a lot of the time. And that's why I have little respect for equally one-sided hatchet pieces, however entertainingly written. They're equally dishonest and therefore equally worthless.

So now we went from smoke and mirrors to shifting goal posts. Nice.

First off, the vast majority of analytical criticism is not a buyer's guide. This is why critiques and reviews are treated as distinct entities. We are talking about critiques here.

Second off, proper analytical criticism is straight forward in its intention. To keep it in the realm of gaming, here is the ending quote of Mattewmatosis's video regarding Bioshock: Infinite. Notice it is called a critique and not a review.

"My intent was never to provide a completely balanced view on this game but rather to show how the endless praise around it has been utterly absurd."

It can't be a hatchet job if you say you are showcasing the bad because it implies "go somewhere else if you want to hear the good stuff which does exist".

I don’t want

Fortunately we live in a reality where what you want doesn't matter and won't change the semantic value of a word. Pretension implies a knowing lie at its core. In many ways it is opposite of something being personal. Using the word pretension to describe an experience you don't like or don't relate to is wrong. Grab a thesaurus and find the word that properly describes your issues with the work in question.

 

[Prime Junta]

It can't be a hatchet job if you say you are showcasing the bad because it implies "go somewhere else if you want to hear the good stuff which does exist".

I entirely agree. But who's shifting the goalposts now?

Or, alternatively: can you give me a couple of examples of game critiques from the Codex -- i.e., critical pieces about specific games which are not billed as reviews, and which do include statements of intent like the one you're quoting in re Bioshock?

 

[RK47]

fuck reading

 

[Neanderthal]

fuck reading

Pages get stuck together if you do that, an paper cuts are fuckin lethal.

 

[Black Angel]

And that’s exactly why is ridiculously pretentious. I don’t want the developer popping his head all the time to talk directly to me and remind me that he is making a gimmick or deconstructing cRPG established features. The only thing worse than superficial individuals with delusions of depth are postmodernist experiments with delusions of innovation and artsy individualism.

Once again, you missed the point here, man. None of the post you addressed talked about how Undertale deconstructing established features and such, but how it utilize different fonts and graphics features (and also frequently utilize different audio where it's appropriate) to present narrative in a way that won't hinder gameplay, unlike many new cRPGs from big developers (and AAA titles in general) who poorly implement features from other genres/medium.

 

[Raziel]