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Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Last week I used to be: Talking about entropy in MMORPGs, and being a busy bee in World of Warcraft.
I’ve seen a pattern—significantly in some latest RPGs—of, effectively, let’s name it ‘Netflixiness’.
Dialogue designed to depart completely nothing to interpretation, to exposit data in probably the most direct approach doable, devoid of any actual character or context. There’s an assumption that any second the viewers spends confused, curious, or out-of-the-loop is a story catastrophe.
Given the game’s troubled development history, and the fact that some of its writers have produced perfectly fine work before (Mordin Solus, for cryin’ out loud), I’m led to believe this pattern comes from the top. Well, I have a hunch.
When Varric says “That ritual is going to tear down the Veil—the only thing separating us from the Fade and an endless number of demons” to Rook, his mission partner, who should know all of this already, I can’t help but think of one thing. Second screen viewing.
In this excellent article within the International Journal of Communication, Daphne Rena Idiz recounts a time the place an interviewee instructed her that Netflix had insisted: “What you need to know about your audience here is that they will watch the show, perhaps on their mobile phone, or on a second or third screen while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you need to both show and tell, you need to say much more than you would normally say.”
Now Harvey, one may say, that makes completely no sense. Videogames—with some exceptions in style, like idlers—aren’t performed as second display screen actions. To which I might reply: You’re precisely proper, however since when has that stopped executives from chasing tendencies towards frequent sense earlier than? These are the individuals who thought Veilguard nonetheless ought to’ve been a reside service recreation. After all the pieces.
This is conjecture, however I do not suppose it is out of pocket to imagine a few of these corporations are chasing the narrative successes of streaming providers. Or that in doing so, their massive bosses may undertake all types of “wisdom” designed for making media meant to be consumed, not loved.
After all, in these second-screen reveals, nothing is left as much as likelihood. If your viewers will get misplaced, it is dangerous. If your viewers will get confused, it is dangerous. Bad tales are complicated. Good tales are understood. I do know this stuff as a result of I’ve checked out different good, common tales.
The Veilguard follows on this pattern, as a result of it is a recreation that is fearful of audiences getting misplaced at any level. As fellow PCG author Lauren Morton put it, it is “desperate to chew my food for me”. And whether or not the issue lies with massive movers and shakers at EA, or their chosen testing audiences, it would not matter. Because we’re taking pictures ourselves within the foot, right here.
Everybody loses
Videogames are loved in a ton of various methods—some are even designed so that you can faucet out of the story completely, or to solely have interaction with it as an choice. And that is high-quality. But you can’t, as EA did, attain for different audiences on the belief that the nerds will like whatever you give ’em.
Some players will skip every cutscene, glaze over every dialogue entry, and hammer their skip button ’till the face button’s worn out. And I have no qualm with these people—they simply value a different set of things from me. We can coexist. It’s the design assumption that we must be met in the middle that’s messing us up.
For this player, a story that’s impossible to ignore will barely register for them. If anything, it might backfire—making them feel coddled or pushed into situations they don’t care about. And for me, dialogue that’s written for people who aren’t paying attention makes my brain want to crawl out of my skull and autonomously go do anything else.
Here’s the thing: Good writing advice says to ‘show, not tell’ not because everything must be shown as soon as it comes up, lest the audience be lost, but because it’s inherently more interesting to give us the pieces we need to draw conclusions. Crucially, you don’t always have to actually give people information.
Confusion isn’t a fail-state, not having the answers immediately isn’t a disaster. It’s okay to let a question mark float above your player’s head, or to trust they’ll get the gist from context clues. We can tell the ritual Varric and Rook are trying to stop is dangerous because they’re trying to stop it. I promise.
Confusion isn’t a fail-state, not having the answers immediately isn’t a disaster.”
I feel like there’s this phantom assumed viewer who, without a full set of narrative cards in their hand, will throw their controller and immediately do something else. And that makes me sad, because it assumes your players aren’t curious. That they don’t want to have questions, or aren’t interested in seeing where something leads.
Some aren’t, sure, but if you design videogame stories for them, you rob from your most invested players the simple pleasures. Analysing the story, looking deeper into scenes, discussing it with each other online. And as someone who watched Final Fantasy 14 reach a fever-pitch of over-explaining during Dawntrail, that stings, let me tell you.
I’m sick of seeing games with an air of corporate weight sitting on top of them. I’m tired of watching a scene and going “yep, that probably tested well with audiences”. I’m exhausted by this pervasive idea that writers are to be resented, or that I have the memory of a goldfish (I do, but that’s besides the point).
I want to get a little lost. I want to have to think about what a scene I just watched meant. I want to see where your story goes, rather than be told where it’s headed. We simply cannot keep making videogames for people who aren’t paying attention, because it won’t change anything for them—and it’s making the rest of us bloody miserable.
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