"Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 are hailed as two of the best-written games ever", You misspelt Planescape Torment and more recently Disco Elysium. More time has been spent discussing the story of the development of Psychonauts than it's actual story. Most the time people talk about it they talk about specific set pieces rather than the plot. Your twitter take on 2 is rather interesting but in all seriousness you should google "best written games" and tell me how far you have to scroll before you see any doublefine game in a top 10/20 list. They are beloved but you are the first person I've ever seen say they a hailed as narrative behemoths.
Completely unrelated note something else to factor in is just because players don't engage with a story doesn't mean they don't care it's there. It makes no rational sense but there are several things a game needs to be enjoyable even if most it's audience never touches it. 80% of players will never finish a game and see the finale (on average). Part of it is they don't want the game to end (you do get higher completion rates if you make it clear to the player they can playing after the main story ends, but there are right and wrong ways to do this). Part of it is they get their fill and move onto other snacks. So if 80% of the time having a finale doesn't matter, why even have it? Because if it's not there the time you put into the game feels wasted. Having an ending means the time investment feels like it's working towards something, even if you never actually see it.
Players want to skip the story and get right back into the action isn't quite accurate. They want to engage with the story at their own pace. The reason people skip the story is because devs make it necessary to do so to progress at your own pace when players aren't ready to engage at that point. And once you start skipping story beats what is the point of any of it? They'll engage with the story more when the story waits for them. They'll engage with the game less altogether if it has no story at all, even if they would otherwise ignore most of it.
Lastly one must consider the whole concept of story telling without words. Not just show it don't say it. Some games entire plots unfold wordlessly, it's a type of story telling videogames especially excel at. The first 3 Metroid games have barely a page of text between them but fans can opine for hours about the plot of the first 3 games. By contrast the Metroid game that tried to be verbally story driven (Other M) is the most reviled in the franchise and the majority of fans want it stricken from the canon. Do Metroid fans just hate story and lore? Quite the opposite. The Metroid Prime series is also well loved and it has novels worth of text in it. But that lore is engage at leisure (and was also actually well written unlike the other example). But the fact the stories of the original games (well, more the 2nd and 3rd) are probably the most fondly remembered really emphasises there is a lot more to telling a story in a game than just actual writing.
The art of story telling in games isn't really in the quality of the writing. It's in the presentation of it.
If Guardians of the Galaxy is in your range of acceptable stories (I think it's fine, not dragging it - the characters are all essentially the same variety of idiot with a different neurosis though) then dismissing all game stories comes off as the bad kind of hyperbole. You mentioned two games yourself that I'd put over that - the Portal games easily have better writing. Looking beyond, you have Grim Fandango, Disco Elysium, Star Control 2, Killer 7 - there are more I wouldn't be embarrassed to add. It's a short list, but it's a list. Dwelling on the recycling of basic plot structure is Cinema Sins-level garbage analysis, not going to bother with that. I don't even disagree with the core of your thesis - games writing is far from fantastic overall - but you make me want to not agree. If that was the point: congratulations, you did a controversy on the internet. Real hard to get people yelling about stuff on the internet - great job there.
I think you're right in almost all of your arguments and wrong in your conclusion. It's true that the average gamer has low standards for storytelling (though this is also arguably true of the average TV viewer, filmgoer, etc), and it's true that a large portion of gaming audience views story as secondary. It's also true that 95% of video games have stories that range from "absolute dreck" to "solid but unspectular takes on genre fiction" (I'd put Spiderweb's games in the latter category, and I don't mean that as a criticism - I like solid takes on genre fiction, and it's well above the average!).
But it doesn't follow that "Each of these is a thousand miles beyond the best video game in terms of storytelling." There *are* interesting and intelligent video game narratives that aren't just lesser imitations of other forms; as an example, I've never enjoyed a coming-of-age story as much as Night in the Woods. And that's an example of a (somewhat) linear story told well, as opposed to all the more complex, interactive, experential stories that games can offer (I'd put Heaven's Vault as a game that would lose a good deal translated into a static medium, which isn't stopping the writer from trying). And, yeah, Disco Elysium is as well written as any book I've ever read.
I know that it's sort of your schtick to make strong, objective, somewhat hyperbolic statements and it's sort of silly to argue with it, but I find the vast majority of your arguments to be well-reasoned, and this one just seems a bridge too far. There are wonderful things in every medium, people have diverse tastes, and it's certainly not a given that a more satisfying story exists for a given person in a nother medium (for instance, I'm finding that excellent narrative in television is harder to find than it is in video games!),
I think you sell yourself short, man. I mean maybe you aren't the type of writer that can author a Dragonlance novel, but a Dragonlance novelist probably can't do what you do either, which is maintain their writing skills and imagination in the presence of video game graphics. Some of your descriptions are unreal with how well they're written. Especially as someone who basically only plays your games on Torment difficulty, I have to take the time to comprehend the image you're conjuring, because I might be stuck in that environment for kind of a while.
Realistically, I think you could make a terrible story and still sell the game on its described environments and characters. I fuckin' love me some Avernum, though, as the stories really are pretty engaging. I mean.. a giant cave? Mushrooms on the ceiling lighting things up? Factions, racism, believable interactions between people and groups? There wasn't exactly a lot of disbelief to suspend - it was a fantastic world. An author wouldn't think "Okay, so what does the player see right here?" because they already have a rhythm to go with from paragraph to paragraph. You, to create new stuff, have to often start with very little and snowball it to completion (haha). I'm sure when you first thought of Avernum, you probably didn't even have an empire in mind or anything. You probably just had a cave and wanted to build from that. I don't even know where I'm going with this - I guess I'm just trying to say that this type of authoring skill is simply different than the way people would approach writing a novel.
I just wish Microsoft didn't own the Shadowrun IP, and maybe someone really competent with writing could make a Shadowrun game in a similar way to Avernum. Lots of written detail. I also love Pillars of Eternity very much, which I'd say probably does have a better *story* than Avernum, but not better writing or better environments. Quality writing goes a long, long way.
Psychonauts has some lovely environmental storytelling, but it's based around the characters. The 'secret' room in Milla's mind for example is utterly brilliant. One of games' great storytelling strengths is you can have entirely optional things like that which you stumble across (or don't). Discovery by the player gives it much more impact than in linear media where they would tend to slap you around the face with it.
What Psychonauts doesn't have is a particularly interesting plot.
Jeff, if you're going to start a new blog at least advertise it! I had an RSS subscription to your old blog and backed Queens Wish 2. Why is the first time I'm hearing of this when I see this blog on the front page of Hacker News? :)
I think you're underselling some of the potentials of games as a medium. I mean, if you want a linear story filled with dialogue and no graphics it's essentially a book (which is perfectly fine). Games afford completely different experiences, audio-visual storytelling, showing not telling, and so on. Sometimes you can look at the environment and reconstruct the story on your own mind... that's incredibly powerful "writing"/storytelling without dialogue at all. Sometimes the events and settings are incredibly remarkable, more than any dialogue. Also, there are new devices like interactivity and non-linearity (which I admit is technically very challenging and resource intensive) which can have great effect.
Games remind me from the quote of St. Exupery: "La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que tous les livres. Parce qu'elle nous résiste." -- real life teaches much more than any book, because it resists us. Books don't resist quite as much as real life, but it has interesting new resistive (and experiential) potential.
On the other hand, maybe try not telling/showing *too much* and always leave space for deduction and imagination. :)
"Good story/good writing" cannot be overstated. I have stopped right in the middle of massive console RPGs with all the graphical fixings only to never restart them because the story bored me.
I first became aware of Spiderweb from the Generforge 2 review in PC Gamer. I read your old blog for years and was pleased to discover that you had not stopped blogging but had just moved over here. I'm envious of your ability to "live the dream" making games. Keep up the good work.
Great article! I'd love to read your thoughts on Disco Elysium and also this new game called Sacred Fire which describes itself as a 'psychological role-playing game'.
That's one of the worst tired old man yelling "get off my lawn" rants I've read. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 was new tech and story telling has greatly improved and I've certainly played games that are better than many of the films I've seen over the last decade. Games don't tell stories more poorly than film, they tell them differently because it's interactive. That's the same idiotic mentality people have to deal with when some knuckle dragger always needs to make the comment about a book being better than a movie when they're not even comparable story telling devices. You also have to love the irony of you complaining about story telling in games while patting yourself on the back for some self deluded accomplishment. You've been rehashing and remixing the same generic 1970's/80's bare bones fantasy stories for three decades. That's when you decide to actually even do something new instead of your 7th remake of your own games. 11-11 Memories Retold, The Witcher 3, Amnesia Rebirth, and Bioshock are just some of the games I've played over the last month or two and they're light years beyond anything you've ever done and better than 99% of what passes for theatrical cinema over the last decade, dominated as it was by superhero movies so bad my niece picked apart some of their plots and she's not even in middle school. Storytelling in games has never been stronger, but it's never going to be a film, or a book, or a tv show. Then again, if I were stuck in the past, spinning my tires and doing the same thing over and over without end like you have, I'd probably be ranting like a goofball as well. It's not that the industries gotten worse, it's simply passed you by.
The note of gamers needing to be able to disengage from the story, that brought to mind Fallout New Vegas. One of the factors for the never-ending lovefest the game receives is how things have been designed to weave the 'plot' together with its open world gameplay. Any given sidequest informs some element of the main conflict in the story, either conveying details of how it affects people, making some thematic point or so on.
I thought it was interesting, because it's a vibe I've gotten from your games sometimes. It's not always as direct, but a lot of what you can do in Geneforge when not 'directly' pursuing the main plot still informs you about the world and the Shaper-centered conflict. I think it's an approach that plays to the strengths of video games and can make their writing grasp something you wouldn't get in other mediums, even if many players don't quite realize it's happening. I'm not sure I would consider it a form of 'allowing players to ignore the story', though.
I feel like there is some layer of irony going on with this article beacuse some things you said make little sense. You cricitice smug ironic dialogue while this entire article is written exactly like that. Also you reduce the plot of most games as 'See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy' while at the same time naming four movies/tv shows with apparently better stories but that in reality follow that exact same structure. Even Hamlet. That was on purpose right?
"Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 are hailed as two of the best-written games ever", You misspelt Planescape Torment and more recently Disco Elysium. More time has been spent discussing the story of the development of Psychonauts than it's actual story. Most the time people talk about it they talk about specific set pieces rather than the plot. Your twitter take on 2 is rather interesting but in all seriousness you should google "best written games" and tell me how far you have to scroll before you see any doublefine game in a top 10/20 list. They are beloved but you are the first person I've ever seen say they a hailed as narrative behemoths.
Completely unrelated note something else to factor in is just because players don't engage with a story doesn't mean they don't care it's there. It makes no rational sense but there are several things a game needs to be enjoyable even if most it's audience never touches it. 80% of players will never finish a game and see the finale (on average). Part of it is they don't want the game to end (you do get higher completion rates if you make it clear to the player they can playing after the main story ends, but there are right and wrong ways to do this). Part of it is they get their fill and move onto other snacks. So if 80% of the time having a finale doesn't matter, why even have it? Because if it's not there the time you put into the game feels wasted. Having an ending means the time investment feels like it's working towards something, even if you never actually see it.
Players want to skip the story and get right back into the action isn't quite accurate. They want to engage with the story at their own pace. The reason people skip the story is because devs make it necessary to do so to progress at your own pace when players aren't ready to engage at that point. And once you start skipping story beats what is the point of any of it? They'll engage with the story more when the story waits for them. They'll engage with the game less altogether if it has no story at all, even if they would otherwise ignore most of it.
Lastly one must consider the whole concept of story telling without words. Not just show it don't say it. Some games entire plots unfold wordlessly, it's a type of story telling videogames especially excel at. The first 3 Metroid games have barely a page of text between them but fans can opine for hours about the plot of the first 3 games. By contrast the Metroid game that tried to be verbally story driven (Other M) is the most reviled in the franchise and the majority of fans want it stricken from the canon. Do Metroid fans just hate story and lore? Quite the opposite. The Metroid Prime series is also well loved and it has novels worth of text in it. But that lore is engage at leisure (and was also actually well written unlike the other example). But the fact the stories of the original games (well, more the 2nd and 3rd) are probably the most fondly remembered really emphasises there is a lot more to telling a story in a game than just actual writing.
The art of story telling in games isn't really in the quality of the writing. It's in the presentation of it.
If Guardians of the Galaxy is in your range of acceptable stories (I think it's fine, not dragging it - the characters are all essentially the same variety of idiot with a different neurosis though) then dismissing all game stories comes off as the bad kind of hyperbole. You mentioned two games yourself that I'd put over that - the Portal games easily have better writing. Looking beyond, you have Grim Fandango, Disco Elysium, Star Control 2, Killer 7 - there are more I wouldn't be embarrassed to add. It's a short list, but it's a list. Dwelling on the recycling of basic plot structure is Cinema Sins-level garbage analysis, not going to bother with that. I don't even disagree with the core of your thesis - games writing is far from fantastic overall - but you make me want to not agree. If that was the point: congratulations, you did a controversy on the internet. Real hard to get people yelling about stuff on the internet - great job there.
I think you're right in almost all of your arguments and wrong in your conclusion. It's true that the average gamer has low standards for storytelling (though this is also arguably true of the average TV viewer, filmgoer, etc), and it's true that a large portion of gaming audience views story as secondary. It's also true that 95% of video games have stories that range from "absolute dreck" to "solid but unspectular takes on genre fiction" (I'd put Spiderweb's games in the latter category, and I don't mean that as a criticism - I like solid takes on genre fiction, and it's well above the average!).
But it doesn't follow that "Each of these is a thousand miles beyond the best video game in terms of storytelling." There *are* interesting and intelligent video game narratives that aren't just lesser imitations of other forms; as an example, I've never enjoyed a coming-of-age story as much as Night in the Woods. And that's an example of a (somewhat) linear story told well, as opposed to all the more complex, interactive, experential stories that games can offer (I'd put Heaven's Vault as a game that would lose a good deal translated into a static medium, which isn't stopping the writer from trying). And, yeah, Disco Elysium is as well written as any book I've ever read.
I know that it's sort of your schtick to make strong, objective, somewhat hyperbolic statements and it's sort of silly to argue with it, but I find the vast majority of your arguments to be well-reasoned, and this one just seems a bridge too far. There are wonderful things in every medium, people have diverse tastes, and it's certainly not a given that a more satisfying story exists for a given person in a nother medium (for instance, I'm finding that excellent narrative in television is harder to find than it is in video games!),
I think you sell yourself short, man. I mean maybe you aren't the type of writer that can author a Dragonlance novel, but a Dragonlance novelist probably can't do what you do either, which is maintain their writing skills and imagination in the presence of video game graphics. Some of your descriptions are unreal with how well they're written. Especially as someone who basically only plays your games on Torment difficulty, I have to take the time to comprehend the image you're conjuring, because I might be stuck in that environment for kind of a while.
Realistically, I think you could make a terrible story and still sell the game on its described environments and characters. I fuckin' love me some Avernum, though, as the stories really are pretty engaging. I mean.. a giant cave? Mushrooms on the ceiling lighting things up? Factions, racism, believable interactions between people and groups? There wasn't exactly a lot of disbelief to suspend - it was a fantastic world. An author wouldn't think "Okay, so what does the player see right here?" because they already have a rhythm to go with from paragraph to paragraph. You, to create new stuff, have to often start with very little and snowball it to completion (haha). I'm sure when you first thought of Avernum, you probably didn't even have an empire in mind or anything. You probably just had a cave and wanted to build from that. I don't even know where I'm going with this - I guess I'm just trying to say that this type of authoring skill is simply different than the way people would approach writing a novel.
I just wish Microsoft didn't own the Shadowrun IP, and maybe someone really competent with writing could make a Shadowrun game in a similar way to Avernum. Lots of written detail. I also love Pillars of Eternity very much, which I'd say probably does have a better *story* than Avernum, but not better writing or better environments. Quality writing goes a long, long way.
Dude I love the honesty of this. Makes me hopeful somewhat.
Psychonauts has some lovely environmental storytelling, but it's based around the characters. The 'secret' room in Milla's mind for example is utterly brilliant. One of games' great storytelling strengths is you can have entirely optional things like that which you stumble across (or don't). Discovery by the player gives it much more impact than in linear media where they would tend to slap you around the face with it.
What Psychonauts doesn't have is a particularly interesting plot.
Jeff, if you're going to start a new blog at least advertise it! I had an RSS subscription to your old blog and backed Queens Wish 2. Why is the first time I'm hearing of this when I see this blog on the front page of Hacker News? :)
I think you're underselling some of the potentials of games as a medium. I mean, if you want a linear story filled with dialogue and no graphics it's essentially a book (which is perfectly fine). Games afford completely different experiences, audio-visual storytelling, showing not telling, and so on. Sometimes you can look at the environment and reconstruct the story on your own mind... that's incredibly powerful "writing"/storytelling without dialogue at all. Sometimes the events and settings are incredibly remarkable, more than any dialogue. Also, there are new devices like interactivity and non-linearity (which I admit is technically very challenging and resource intensive) which can have great effect.
Games remind me from the quote of St. Exupery: "La terre nous en apprend plus long sur nous que tous les livres. Parce qu'elle nous résiste." -- real life teaches much more than any book, because it resists us. Books don't resist quite as much as real life, but it has interesting new resistive (and experiential) potential.
On the other hand, maybe try not telling/showing *too much* and always leave space for deduction and imagination. :)
It is strange, but you cannot up yourself like this, I haven't even heard of one of your games.
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"Good story/good writing" cannot be overstated. I have stopped right in the middle of massive console RPGs with all the graphical fixings only to never restart them because the story bored me.
I first became aware of Spiderweb from the Generforge 2 review in PC Gamer. I read your old blog for years and was pleased to discover that you had not stopped blogging but had just moved over here. I'm envious of your ability to "live the dream" making games. Keep up the good work.
Great article! I'd love to read your thoughts on Disco Elysium and also this new game called Sacred Fire which describes itself as a 'psychological role-playing game'.
That's one of the worst tired old man yelling "get off my lawn" rants I've read. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 was new tech and story telling has greatly improved and I've certainly played games that are better than many of the films I've seen over the last decade. Games don't tell stories more poorly than film, they tell them differently because it's interactive. That's the same idiotic mentality people have to deal with when some knuckle dragger always needs to make the comment about a book being better than a movie when they're not even comparable story telling devices. You also have to love the irony of you complaining about story telling in games while patting yourself on the back for some self deluded accomplishment. You've been rehashing and remixing the same generic 1970's/80's bare bones fantasy stories for three decades. That's when you decide to actually even do something new instead of your 7th remake of your own games. 11-11 Memories Retold, The Witcher 3, Amnesia Rebirth, and Bioshock are just some of the games I've played over the last month or two and they're light years beyond anything you've ever done and better than 99% of what passes for theatrical cinema over the last decade, dominated as it was by superhero movies so bad my niece picked apart some of their plots and she's not even in middle school. Storytelling in games has never been stronger, but it's never going to be a film, or a book, or a tv show. Then again, if I were stuck in the past, spinning my tires and doing the same thing over and over without end like you have, I'd probably be ranting like a goofball as well. It's not that the industries gotten worse, it's simply passed you by.
The note of gamers needing to be able to disengage from the story, that brought to mind Fallout New Vegas. One of the factors for the never-ending lovefest the game receives is how things have been designed to weave the 'plot' together with its open world gameplay. Any given sidequest informs some element of the main conflict in the story, either conveying details of how it affects people, making some thematic point or so on.
I thought it was interesting, because it's a vibe I've gotten from your games sometimes. It's not always as direct, but a lot of what you can do in Geneforge when not 'directly' pursuing the main plot still informs you about the world and the Shaper-centered conflict. I think it's an approach that plays to the strengths of video games and can make their writing grasp something you wouldn't get in other mediums, even if many players don't quite realize it's happening. I'm not sure I would consider it a form of 'allowing players to ignore the story', though.
I feel like there is some layer of irony going on with this article beacuse some things you said make little sense. You cricitice smug ironic dialogue while this entire article is written exactly like that. Also you reduce the plot of most games as 'See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy' while at the same time naming four movies/tv shows with apparently better stories but that in reality follow that exact same structure. Even Hamlet. That was on purpose right?