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

[Lurker King]

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.

Well, if you ask me that's a retarded feature. I didn't like that in comic books, I didn't like that in VtM:B, and I sure as hell won't like this thing to become a new trend just because people want narrative inovations in cRPGs and are out of ideas. It's a stupid idea. Words don't need to represent the speaker's attitude. This documentary has some discussions about the history and purpose of fonts.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

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

And the whole Tyranny writing team be like

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

How old can we say cinematography, in the sense of long movies telling actual stories, was in Keaton’s time? Let’s say roughly 15 years. Already at that time did Keaton realise that your mute visual medium cannot function properly if based on text screens. So instead he focused on what the medium does stand for – action and visuals. We are now in 2017, video games have been around for over 35 years, they have turned into a huge industry and business, and we are still stuck with people who think that touting the hundred million billion word count in their new RPG is a good idea.

That's what I was thinking when I was playing MGS5TPP. I was thinking "wow, so this is how the apogee of this medium looks like."

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.

Just buy a gamepad and get to it. When you get into it, you'll never be the same again. I played DS1 2-3 hours before abandoning, but I didn't have a gamepad yet. A friend insisted on me buying one and giving it another try. Best advice I ever got. And I still hate gamepad and games that need it, but DS is an exception.

 

[Black Angel]

Well, if you ask me that's a retarded feature. I didn't like that in comic books, I didn't like that in VtM:B, and I sure as hell won't like this thing to become a new trend just because people want narrative inovations in cRPGs and are out of ideas. It's a stupid idea. Words don't need to represent the speaker's attitude. This documentary has some discussions about the history and purpose of fonts.

Depends on the genre, then. JRPGs, especially those using RPGmaker (and games aiming at being 'emotional' like Undertale and horror ones like Misao and the likes) can freely use the feature without being outright retarded.

I do, however, love the way AoD present the lore by having it hidden behind, well, the Lore skill checks, sometimes INT stat. CHA also get checked before an NPC even consider telling you their backstory and shit. Maybe cRPGs should take cue at this and have some Lore-like skill for a character to even know about the lore of the gameworld and, thus, present the narrative (lore dumps) ONLY when the character have the sufficient skill or stats like Wisdom/Intelligence/Charisma to even start bothering NPCs about the world and their past/backstory.

Now that I think about it, Underrail managed to utilize green-colored texts to describe situations and an NPC's appearance, allowing players to easily distinguish between the descriptive narration and NPC's dialogue.

 

[Mustawd]

Not bad for an unhinged lunatic. Good job Darth Roxor

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Good read, Darth Roxor! :russiastronk:
Although as someone already pointed out, it's kind of funny that the article, which argued against unnecessary verbosiness, turned out to be so verbose itself. I mostly agree with you on your main points, although I tend to disagree with you on lore.

t’s empty information with no significance, and the number 1 sin of the current approach to worldbuilding – over-exposition.

I'd argue that in many occasions lore isn't pointless. It's pointless when it basically copies something we're familiar with, or explain something can gather from context, sure. It's really bad when it's presented to you like Wikipedia in loredumps. But when the player, or the reader, aren't familiar with the world, when the world is way different from ours - then the lore, if presented correctly, can make up for a huge chunk of game's or novel's atmosphere, e.g. Planescape. And not only in this case. I was an oWoD player and storyteller, and for me the metaplot, somewhat controversial feature of WW old rulebooks, made a huge part of the appeal of that setting.

Even worse in this regard is Shadowrun: Hong Kong. In PoE, NPCs only dumped lore at you, which was already bad enough, but in HK, you are bombed with uninteresting, samey life stories of people who Used To Be Someone In Seattle But Then Had To Start Running The Shadows™©®. It’s perplexing that with a setting as big as Shadowrun, Hong Kong chooses to bore you to tears with this kind of mundane crap.

I disagree completely, I think you have mixed up a personal preference, or rather personal dislike, with an objective arguement. Given by your previous paragraph about Durance, you dislike when character drama in general, and when is disconnected from gameplay in particular. Sure, I understand that. But SR: HK conversations were written both, well, not brilliantly, but evocatively and competently, at least for some party members. Conversions also were tied to their personal missions, so they weren't disconnected from gameplay.

And finally, to mention something non-RPG for a change, also be sure to note the first Innsmouth chapter in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

Agree with you on environmental storytelling, funny thing is, Mitsodas really tried to do this in their Dead State, and sometimes even suceeded. Game wasn't really good though, but that aspect of it I really liked.

- “The air is humid and dank” – but is the air also watery and wet? The air in the world of TToN is generally rather strange, considering that another time it’s “dead and stifling”, and yet another “thick, foul and textured with the slickness of maggots”. “Textured with the slickness of maggots” is quite the exemplar of empty meaning. I once had a flour moth infestation in my kitchen, and if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that maggots don’t leave any trace in the air, and they certainly don’t “texture” it with their “slickness”, whatever in God’s name that is even supposed to convey.

- “Suddenly, a grotesque noise rings through your shared worlds, like a bell if bells could rot” – take a moment to think about this last part, “if bells could rot”, and try to imagine it. Does this phrase actually tell you anything? How would the supposed rot influence the sound of the bell, apart from making it “grotesque”, which is just as vague? Would it be higher or lower pitched? Distorted? Muffled? Hello? Further, I would argue that bells, and metal items in general, can “rot” in a way, by becoming rusted through. Suddenly, “like a bell if bells could rust” sounds much less fancy and otherworldly… Similar to Numenera air, “like x if x could y” is a common construction as well – another poignant one is “you sense something… different. A smell, if emotions could smell.”

- "In front of you is a weary traveler whose grim visage is mostly obscured by a pointy hat. Upon closer inspection, the lines on his face indicate he has seen much and has many tales to tell" – for someone whose visage is “mostly obscured”, that’s certainly a lot of visible features to be described (weary, grim, lines on his face so prominent to indicate many things).

- "It wears fine clothes that serve to accentuate the tall, thin crest on its head. […]. Its clothes are finely tailored and well made" – take note how much effort the writer is putting into this description to make sure you, the dumb, clueless player, don’t miss a thing.

tl;dr Good read, but needs a competent editor to shorten it.

 

[Jazz_]

The first Deus Ex was great in that regard and avoided the lore dumps by providing information about the world and the plot in a gradual, organic way, you had to read newspaper, e-mails, books on your own, it's tied to gameplay and player agency, and you can ignore it if you want to; also slowly ''solving the puzzle'' by gradually piecing together bits of information is more compelling and stimulating than them walls of text over-abounding with adverbs a la PoE.

 

[Carrion]

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).

The same actually applies to novels as well, which comes back to "show, don't tell" again. Instead of having a character (or the narrator) regurgitate a long piece of exposition about how the Alibabas and the Babayagas are not in the best of terms, it'd be more effective to simply present a situation where the two sides go at each other's throats. Instead of going on about how dangerous a particular area of a city is, you could make the main character(s) run into some of its more unpleasant inhabitants. Instead of telling that a character is batshit crazy, the reader/player should be able to come to that conclusion on his/her own through dialogue, or by observing the character's actions. Regardless of the medium, you'll generally want to convey your story through action rather than mere exposition, even though a book will of course try to achieve this in different ways compared to a play, a movie or a game. Since games are primarily an interactive medium aside from being audiovisual, it's unfortunate that so often their story is told through static exposition (or cinematic cutscenes) rather than utilizing the strengths of the medium. I'm happy that Roxor brought this up in the article, as it's probably my biggest issue with the storytelling in games as a whole.

 

[Grauken]

Good article

now weep, as nothing will change

 

[Naveen]

A great piece.

About what you call 'fantasitis,' yeah, that's Tolkienitis all right. It's the conviction that the setting is a character, and it has to be developed just like any other character (or like the main one!) to give that fictional world a feeling of naturalism or realism. After all, in real life, you hear a lot of stuff that has no relation to you personal "story," so the same thing happens in this style of game writing. The problem is that I'm not sure that works well in fictional settings, especially because we have to learn a whole encyclopedia of new kingdoms, ages, gods, and all that crap to understand the references. If someone tells you his war stories about the Boer War or that time his dick got stung by a foot-long centipede during the Vietnam War, you already know all the key elements, or you can look them up (Vietnam, centipedes, South Africa, etc.) They are interesting because you already know something about them. But if you do that in a fantastic setting, the reader has to learn first what the Kingdom of Nuvukstan is and how it relates to you, what is the Fourth Age (and the First, the Second, the Third... of God, it never ends) or whatever. Although for the writer creating all that may be fascinating, reading it can be a chore.

Why must every mainstream computer role-playing game be written about a singular protagonist with unique powers. A Watcher, a Shard-bearer, a Bhaalspawn. It's actually rather nauseating.

Can we not have an adventure about a band of regular folk trying to make their way in the game world?

Post 70s fantasy and science fiction is mostly about "epic heroes," world-saving Messias, or stuff like that. It had not been like this before, though. Previously, fantasy was mostly about common people in uncommon circumstances or worlds (you know, fantastic stuff.) Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Fritz Lieber) are a just pair of brigands and adventurers, Conan (R. E. Howard) may become a king, but he is not involved in any Epic Struggle; Cugel the Clever (Jack Vance) is a glib sociopath always looking for himself, and the English knights from The High Crusade (Poul Anderson) are just normal medieval people who stumble upon a spaceship and (no kidding) use it to invade another planet, etc. It should be noted that these writers did not create any "deep lore" or serious worldbuilding, and most of them didn't take themselves too seriously. Unfortunately, it is obvious that most contemporary writers don't read these authors anymore.

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.

Partially true, but the true influence of postmodernism (and similar fads) has been how it has warped the ability to write and think even for people who don't know that stuff exists. This is why you have, of all people, video game journalists using once technical jargon like problematic, systemic, normalizing, or narrative (instead of, you know, plot or story.) It's a bit like Marxism and Freudianism, very few people study them directly anymore, but their language and jargon have become mainstream.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Conversions also were tied to their personal missions, so they weren't disconnected from gameplay.

I wasn't talking here about companion characters, because these were alright. I was talking about all the other secondary NPCs that you meet everywhere, and those are honestly terrible with minor exceptions.

 

[Excidium II]

The troll family

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Conversions also were tied to their personal missions, so they weren't disconnected from gameplay.

I wasn't talking here about companion characters, because these were alright. I was talking about all the other secondary NPCs that you meet everywhere, and those are honestly terrible with minor exceptions.

Ah. Well, they tried to go for John Woo and other HK directors' feel I guess. Sometimes they succeeded, for example I liked used tech salesman, Reliable Matthew. Auntie Cheng was cliched, but kinda interesting. Many were mediocre, like that Troll family who owned a bar, and some were bad, true. Then again, this is largely a matter of taste, and tastes differ.

 

[ROARRR]

Spoiler

Clone Wars 2003
Samurai Jack

"...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...."

 

[Ludo Lense]

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

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

Do you? I think I've been pretty consistent on sticking to the point I am trying to make. Which is that Darth Roxor doesn't need to learn what you think he needs to learn because there is nothing wrong with a purely negative critique (which is not necessarily what this particular editorial even is).

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?

Nope but I fail to see the relevance upon the discussion. RPG Codex is very buyer's guide oriented which makes sense for a fan forum of sorts.

 

[Darth Roxor]

but how can one learn what someone thinks one needs to learn when one doesn't even know what one doesn't know?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

This thread is clearly not autistic enough, needs more diagrams

According to this chart, good editing is far more important than good writing or good ideas.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

problematic, systemic, normalizing, or narrative - their language and jargon have become mainstream.

Thats not postmodern jargon, though.

 

[Lurker King]

I do, however, love the way AoD present the lore by having it hidden behind, well, the Lore skill checks, sometimes INT stat. CHA also get checked before an NPC even consider telling you their backstory and shit. Maybe cRPGs should take cue at this and have some Lore-like skill for a character to even know about the lore of the gameworld and, thus, present the narrative (lore dumps) ONLY when the character have the sufficient skill or stats like Wisdom/Intelligence/Charisma to even start bothering NPCs about the world and their past/backstory.

Now that I think about it, Underrail managed to utilize green-colored texts to describe situations and an NPC's appearance, allowing players to easily distinguish between the descriptive narration and NPC's dialogue.

But that is an efficient way to signal the type of skill that is being used, or whether it was successful, etc. I think many other games did this too. My point is that the idea that you should change the font to express the skill that you are using, or class (clan, in this case), is tiresome and silly. We take for granted simple fonts. Darklands would be a much better game if had better fonts.

 

[hivemind]

Witcher 1 is the best written videogame ever made

 

[pomenitul]

Thats not postmodern jargon, though.

It is to someone with a grudge and no first-hand knowledge of late 20th century continental philosophy and/or critical theory.

 

[Lurker King]

Darth Roxor, you mentioned the reasoning that “if it’s game writing, it is bad by default”. But that is not how these things work, is it? Suppose that Tolstoy became a talented developer and decided to write a cRPG. Do you think it would be as good as “War and Peace”? No, I don’t think so. There are many reasons for this. You would need to insert a bunch of small talk, you wouldn’t be able to describe the player’s feelings or many of the details of the world around you. Overall, he would need to provide an impoverish literary experience due to the nature of the genre. So complaining that writing in cRPGs is bad because it can't be compare to classics of the world literature is silly because the story involves the quests, your actions, etc. My point is that writing in cRPGs shouldn’t be evaluated like writing in literature for the same reason that writing in comic books or movies shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards. In each case, you have a different medium that provide a different experience. I think you (we?) are constantly falling in the same trap of these developers you are criticizing. You don’t think they should vomit texts, but at the end of the day you think it sucks because is not like “War and Peace”, which is equally idiotic. My point is that even if in the more heavy text part you can demand quality and impose style and content restrictions, the writing if the genre as a whole shouldn’t be evaluated just by these parts because involves doing something else.

You make the same mistake when you criticized games that pretend to be interactive movies, while arguing that we could take advantage of visual features in a cinematic cRPG. The irony is that you are using a misleading vocabulary (“cinematic”, etc.). First, cinematic cRPGs aren’t cinematic in any meaningful sense of the term. In a well-crafted movie, you have one shot for each scene; you need to consider the light, the camera angle, etc. The audience is passive. Now, in cRPGs, even cinematic ones, the audience is active, helps the “director” to build the story, is constantly moving from point A to point B, can talk to that same NPC more than once, or visit the same city many times. So, the visual approach start to falls apart, because each time you visit the NPC or city, you see the same “movie scene”, and they are not really cinematic in any meaningful sense of the term, i.e., that is no good cinematography, no matter how good the graphics or the artist direction are. That brings me to my second point. In this sense, those “interact movies” or “walkies” are more consciously designed than cinematic sandbox games. Take games like “God of War” and “Ryse - Son of Rome”. They are designed in such a way that you have to take part in a main scene just one time, because that’s the type of cinematic experience you would watch in a movie.

 

[Lurker King]

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)

I don’t think we have anything to benefit from these comparisons whit other genres, because they have different purposes and provide different experiences. Instead of trying to find similarities with other genres, we should build up our explanation from the features we expect cRPGs should have, and then trying to establish some standards for writing from there. For instance, when discussing writing, most people, including Roxor, only focus on the most heavy-text aspect of it. How come? Aren’t quests important? The quests are part of the writing of the game and most cRPGs have retarded writing in the quest department. This should be discussed too. Having simplistic FedEx quests sucks. The alternative to verbose useless bad writing is not brain dead traditional FedEx writing, but better writing tied to gameplay and less cargo cult.

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.

But who said the bigger purpose should disregard the quality of writing? I will repost this. cRPGs are not just games, 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. Thus, there is an implicit assumption that quests, setting, story, NPCs and other stuff should have some plausibility. If you go back in the past, you will find that the very first games to become labeled as cRPGs were boardgames of strategy inspired by wars and historic events.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Darth Roxor, you mentioned the reasoning that “if it’s game writing, it is bad by default”. But that is not how these things work, is it? Suppose that Tolstoy became a talented developer and decided to write a cRPG. Do you think it would be as good as “War and Peace”? No, I don’t think so. There are many reasons for this. You would need to insert a bunch of small talk, you wouldn’t be able to describe the player’s feelings or many of the details of the world around you. Overall, he would need to provide an impoverish literary experience due to the nature of the genre. So complaining that writing in cRPGs is bad because it can't be compare to classics of the world literature is silly because the story involves the quests, your actions, etc. My point is that writing in cRPGs shouldn’t be evaluated like writing in literature for the same reason that writing in comic books or movies shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards. In each case, you have a different medium that provide a different experience. I think you (we?) are constantly falling in the same trap of these developers you are criticizing. You don’t think they should vomit texts, but at the end of the day you think it sucks because is not like “War and Peace”, which is equally idiotic. My point is that even if in the more heavy text part you can demand quality and impose style and content restrictions, the writing if the genre as a whole shouldn’t be evaluated just by these parts because involves doing something else.

You completely misunderstand my points.

I spell it outright in there that the Tolstoy comparison is for the most part a mental exercise because it's unfair to directly compare games to books, so I can hardly see how I'm "falling into the same trap". If anything, I'm analysing the trap that these people have fallen into when they've decided to make their game like a book (tm).

I also don't at any point say that game writing is bad by default - I cite an opinion that you will see extremely often, even on this forum, when you try to criticise a game for its shit story. I also don't make a real qualitative comparison to War and Peace outside that mental exercise that would make me say anything sucks because it's not like W&P - there's a reason why I'm following up the Tolstoy comparison with a "generic fantasy series" example that hits a bit closer to home.

You make the same mistake when you criticized games that pretend to be interactive movies, while arguing that we could take advantage of visual features in a cinematic cRPG. The irony is that you are using a misleading vocabulary (“cinematic”, etc.). First, cinematic cRPGs aren’t cinematic in any meaningful sense of the term. In a well-crafted movie, you have one shot for each scene; you need to consider the light, the camera angle, etc. The audience is passive. Now, in cRPGs, even cinematic ones, the audience is active, helps the “director” to build the story, is constantly moving from point A to point B, can talk to that same NPC more than once, or visit the same city many times. So, the visual approach start to falls apart, because each time you visit the NPC or city, you see the same “movie scene”, and they are not really cinematic in any meaningful sense of the term, i.e., that is no good cinematography, no matter how good the graphics or the artist direction are. That brings me to my second point. In this sense, those “interact movies” or “walkies” are more consciously designed than cinematic sandbox games. Take games like “God of War” and “Ryse - Son of Rome”. They are designed in such a way that you have to take part in a main scene just one time, because that’s the type of cinematic experience you would watch in a movie.

"Cinematic" is a shortcut word that carries with it specific connotations when used in the context of vidya. You are grasping at straws.

When I say RPGs should take more cues from visual media, I don't mean they should become movies. I mean that vidya also happen to be a visual medium to a great extent, and it would bloody well be good for them not to forget about that.

most people, including Roxor, only focus on the most heavy-text aspect of it.

Yes, which is why I mention Grimrock 2 as a positive example to follow. Are you really this stupid or are you just pretending?

 

[Elwro]

[On Dark Souls]Just buy a gamepad and get to it. When you get into it, you'll never be the same again.

Just quoting to reinforce. I am and always have been a huge fan of turn-based games. But the way Dark Souls is written (and voiced), and in particular how the sparse writing connects with the stuff you experience in the game is just amazing --- you will forgive the butt-jabbing boss combat and collision problems.