if you saw your child browsing forums.insertcredit.com would you count that towards their screen time?
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Less so if theyāre like really active in my threads and their posts are good
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I have a question following on from the writing question: When you think about writing in a game, what are you thinking of? Is it the word-to-word, subject verb object, sentence level prose of the game? Is it the plotting or the āoverallā story? Is it characterization? Is it a broad, holistic view of ānarrativeā?
When I talk about video game writing, I mean only the prose. The sentences, the words, the technically incorrect but rhetorically useful commas. I get the impression that others consider writing to be something broader, and Iād like to hear about that.
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Yeah Iām just realizing that when I say āwritingā what I actually mean is narrative lol. Oops. I think I talk that way because in games, where narrative design dictates if a game features any text to begin with, writing is always secondary to narrative. Not a profound idea by any means (plenty of games tell stories without dialogue) but I think I used imprecise language all this time because I sorta took it for granted.
In terms of actual writing, though, I think as with novels I value story and characterization and theme over prose, meaning if I say a game has āgood writingā itās 100% because one or more of those aspects stuck with me.
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On a line-for-line basis Disco Elysium is the most well-written game Iāve played, but Final Fantasy Tactics has my favorite overarching story of anything I played.
Tactics has a translation issue, the PSX version is very rough and the PSP version is a bit too Shakespearean for its own good, but thereās still a good story living inside of both. Some of those PSX lines are sharply to the point and unflowery which comes across better despite the bad translation. Lines like these are classics because of their simplicity: āBlame yourself or Godā and āRamzaā¦ What did you get?ā
I love how the plot unfolds and the constant contrast of the two different heroes and the intertwining paths they take, one is bloodily pragmatic and the other is dreamily optimistic. I really like all of Matsunoās writing, I should get around to finally completing Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story one of these days.
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I would agree that disco has pretty good writing. Doesnāt mean you have to like it!
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Appreciate the question as I find these things usually get mixed up in discussion about such and such a game āhaving good/bad writingā (which, if a game has writing, I usually assume weāre talking about discrete blocks of prose and judging them on the basis of aesthetics).
I started playing The House in Fata Morgana after hearing many times in many places about it telling a great story (the description is usually more superlative than that). My takeaway from the first five or six hours is that the writing, the prose, the experience of reading, is bad. Dialogue is extremely repetitious, clunky, unsubtle, etc etc. Supposedly the characters speak in contemporary language, ālike real people,ā instead of what would be more accurate to the 18th century in order to not āget in the wayā of the readerās understanding of complicated character emotionsāand I can respect this choice in principleābut the English translation doesnāt sound like real people; it sounds like todayās anime. Going beyond that into theme and character, itās pretty standard stuff for anime and video games so far. Of course I have like twenty hours to go and canāt assess the thing holistically, but even so I canāt imagine something that special coming out of this. I guess what I mean by bringing it up is to ask why this is considered not just good writing, but exceptional. Even if you only play VNs it is abjectly mediocre, so what else is going on with this game to make someone think of the writing in particular as great?
At the same time, the bad writing is part of what makes it appeal to me in particular. Iāve been meaning to post about it in the Games We Are Playing threadā¦
Iāve said before that I far prefer the complete tonal neutrality of older Fire Emblem games over the style of, for example, the newer Tactics Ogre translationāolde tymey English situates you in a particular mood, time, place, etc. and canāt just be selectively transplanted into the mouths of fantasy characters. Even when Rockstar tries to make Red Dead Redemption II characters sound as period-accurate as possible, Dutch will say something like āif everything goes to planā or Arthur will call someone a ādickheadā and the illusion falls apart.
Game writing is at its best when it cannot be directly compared to books or moviesāmaybe that sounds obtuse but I mean writing other than spoken dialogue in cutscenes or giant blocks of prose in a visual novel. My favorite writing in games is the flat, affectless narration or descriptions of situations in something like Silent Hill.
āLooking at this makes me feel like someoneās groping around inside my skullā¦ It gives me a weird feeling.ā
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Got a question about camera controls:
At some point I went from an x-axis normal person to an x-axis inverted person but Iām not sure exactly when/why. I know that I shifted because if I load up some really old game saves then they all have the x-axis set to normal. X-axis inverted doesnāt seem to be the industry standard since I have to change it in the options most of the time
Are there any popular/famous games that have the x-axis inverted by default? I actually have a list of every game Iāve played between 2020 and now (but I might have picked up the habit a bit earlier). Iām so curious where I picked this up from, especially because I absolutely cannot play a game with the x-axis normal anymore
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I canāt think of any āfamousā examples more recent than, like, Jak and Daxter, but I feel like Iāve played a lot of games with a birdās eye view where the x-axis was inverted by default for some reason?? Usually RPGs
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I donāt think Undertale has the best āwritingā but Undertale (and Deltarune for that matter) is probably the funniest game.
I think Undertale and Deltarune are also very interesting because, in terms of comedy, there is technique and execution that is absolutely idiosyncratic to the videogame medium itself. You can really tell Toby Fox has spent thousands of hours in RPG Maker testing rooms hidden with little dumb jokes hidden in events and replaying cutscenes over and over again, he is a man who knows how many frames of a beat pause there needs to be between text boxes for the joke heās telling to land the best. I know he has because I have done so myself for at least hundreds of hours and game can recognize game
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X-axis inverted used to be common for Japanese action games. Many 3D games based their camera controls on the standard set by Mario 64, which communicated its idea of the camera to the player by having you move the Lakitu cameraman to the right (orbiting Mario, looking further to the left) by pushing the right C-button, and to the left (looking further right) by pushing the left C-button.
Off the top of my head I know Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, Bayonetta, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and Sonic Adventure (whose camera controls are mapped to the triggers) have inverted X-axis camera controls by default. Thatās not very many and three of them are Nintendo games, but given Nintendoās influence hopefully it goes to show how common it used to be. Games with weapon aiming controls mapped to the secondary analogue stick (Halo etc) were the exceptions to the rule during that generation (as were Resident Evil 4 and Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3, though they had their own camera systems), but the popularity of shooters during the 7th generation was so significant that it changed the standard for the 8th generation forward.
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Re writing:
Disco Elysium strikes me as great in writing. I like the internal chorus of voices, which tunes the unreliable narrator tendencies through a bug-eye. Something I have trouble putting into words has kept me playing for four full playthroughs. Itās partly the texture of dialogue, or the underlying tension between Harryās status as a cop, the choices a player (usually not a cop) might make, in how others react to him (you). Itās partly the fact that it manages to be a political game but not a polemical game: the lens is materialistic, but Joyce, Evrart, and other partisan characters are not caricatures. They can be kind or petty or indulgent or patronizing in turns, and they feel like more than their function in the plot thanks to generous asides, conversational detours, and touches of tone.
It could be the best.
I also go back to examples like the Monkey Island series and appreciate the stitched-together absurdity setting up a comic epic. The Secret of Monkey Island or Monkey Island II (or even Curse - I still liked that one a lot) are great too.
Or, if I want to go for nontraditional presentation (a game that barely involves written text but must have been extensively scripted), Return of the Obra Dinn is now up there for me. The decision of how to tell the story is impressive: the death scenes, the possible order of seeing said scenes, of developing hints and encouraging guesswork that participates in the plot. That could be the best.
Or, if I want to talk about writing as setpiece, where the gameplay mostly runs alongside a story that is delivered in drips of rising tension with beating each level, I think Homeworld is great at realizing its genre (hard sci-fi under duress; part Gundam, part Battlestar Galactica, touches of Dune). The cutscenes work very well interspersed between 15-45 minutes of battle.
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YES! I love the narrative structure and writing of that game. Same goes for Paperās Please. Iām a little bit of a Lucas Pope fanboy, I suppose.
Both of those games do a great job of āDo, donāt show/tellā which is a very uniquely video game hurdle when it comes to narrative.
Watching my digital puppet blabber on in a cutscene, or blabber on while I walk around in circles during a āwalk and talkā yanks me out of the experience. Being able to make the narrative the central game mechanic in an interesting way will automatically pull me in more than even the best written game with traditional means of telling a story.
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this really impressed me, too.
i also really loved this remark from @captain
i suppose iām a land of contrasts
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Iāve always enjoyed the writing in Earthbound. Makes me feel things, ya know.
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Any WHAT???
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Disco Elysium definitely has the most talented writing team.
Others have mentioned Kentucky Route Zero and the NieRs, so Iāll throw out 1000xResist for being the best allegorical game, and the first Portal for being the best comedy. Despite how cliche much of it is now, Portal was genuinely surprising and funny when it was new.
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Think this one is better than the secondācertainly some good moments in the sequel but some of the writing is like ā[joke], now hereās why thatās funnyā
always liked Marc Laidlawās writing in HL2 also
āAnd yet unsophisticated minds continue to imbue him with romantic power, giving him such dangerous poetic labels as The One Free Man, The Opener of the Wayā¦ Let me remind all citizens of the dangers of magical thinking.ā
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She said radio heads!
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