A problem with RPGs: RPG developers are not well-read in myth and fantasy/sci-fi literature

[v1c70r14]

Video games never had good writing and never will, games just aren't a good medium for storytelling. The pedigree of roleplaying games makes them extra bad for telling stories with, slimmed down wargames can't be used to tell the story of Beowulf authentically. Whatever the setting is or how you write the non-player characters it will always be set dressing for playing around with plastic toys and rolling dice. Myth is incompatible with the mechanical.

It's honestly pretty sad that these sorts of threads keep cropping up, even if the industry wasn't a propaganda arm of the ruling ideology and even if the writer had cut her teeth on history and real-world mythology, channelling lived experiences and the wisdom of age through the stroke of her quill, it would still not end up that great. What you want is the impossible, a contradiction. Some ask for these fantastical settings but get mad if they don't feature chests to loot, dungeons to crawl and monsters to slay. They will gnash their teeth if the player isn't getting stronger with each level up and if their itemization quasi-gacha addiction isn't sated. Others namedrop Tolkien but seem to never have read his work. Others still ask for great writing and then fume up when the game presents them with text.

The stink you smell isn't all from the Blackrock sponsored writing teams or incel basement dwellers that have never touched grass or absorbed entertainment deeper than a Marvel movie. It comes from RPGs too. You might as well yell at slot machine manufacturers to read more myth and folklore.

 

[Tyranicon]

Video games never had good writing and never will, games just aren't a good medium for storytelling.

It's weird. I both agree and disagree with this statement enthusiastically.

Non-linear storytelling in an interactive medium is very fucking hard to get right, which explains why nobody really has or is really trying.

Even good writers (???) in gamedev are mostly stuck in the old methods of linear storytelling.

Is it really 4d chess to write good non-linear fiction? I dunno about that either. I think the key is to allow for player choice to affect narrative.

But the problem with that is you need both someone who is good at conventional plotlines, and also allow for significant player agency. How I'm attempting to answer this is with player generated-canon over a series of games. I guess we'll see if it works or not.

TL;DR: If most modern writers weren't such limp-wristed, talentless hacks, they would try to revolutionize the medium through the use of non-linear anime porn games of dubious quality.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Yea when you look at older stuff you'll find more good things. Lord of light is also about as much sci-fi as it is fantasy. Great book. Still, 50s-80s sci-fi mogs fantasy as a whole any day.

I'd say Lord of Light is completely SciFi, and doesn't even make sense if viewed as Fantasy. The whole point of the novel is that the colonists are using their tech to pretend to be gods, I'm not sure how a reader could mistake them for actual gods.

Same with Book of the New Sun. Other than Severian himself (and even then, I probably missed something), it is fairly solidly SciFi. Wolfe wrote fantasy as well, though (Wizard Knight, Latro).

Lord of Light and The Book of the New Sun are on both my Best Fantasy list and my Best Science Fiction list; both novels are science fiction in that they occur in the (distant) future with an ostensibly technological explanation for anything, but they can be read as fantasy featuring magical items and creatures (somewhat less easily for The Book of the New Sun, but certainly for Lord of Light). In Lord of Light, some of the characters possess psionic abilities that can fit in SF but also interpreted as magical powers in a fantasy setting, the descendants of the colonists exist in medieval conditions with advanced technology controlled by the crew-members who are passing themselves off as gods, the relatively small number of high-tech items being used by the pseudo-deities can be viewed as magic items (e.g. the replacement Indra wields a wand of fireballs), the planet being colonized contains native alien life that can also be viewed as fantasy monsters, etc.

As an example in many generic fantasy stories and pretty much almost all generic fantasy games, you can kill some bandits (or local equivalent baddies), grab their stuff, sell that stuff to local merchants and have the local populace be thankful to you. Meanwhile in a modern setting killing the bandits will have you get convicted for murder, no retail store accepts their customers selling them stuff and if you manage to sell anything after a while the tax man will come after you.

The Jagged Alliance games beg to differ.

i've started to wonder if this might be part of the problem, many games feel like they're trying to be like books (too verbose) or movies (endless cutscenes). maybe video games haven't really figured out the storytelling methods most suited for the medium yet, and in the future all crpgs will be like ray-traced vr ballet or something, more le sacre du printemps than planescape torment

Certain videogames figured out story-telling methods suitable for the medium decades ago, but few RPGs have embraced these techniques, with FromSoft games being notable exceptions.

Spoiler

Another World (1991), for the Commodore Amiga
Ico (2001), for the Sony Playstation 2, began development using Amigas and was deeply influenced by Another World
Shadow of the Colossus (2005) was the next game made by the development team of Ico, sold much better, and has been quite influential

 

[Harthwain]

Video games never had good writing and never will, games just aren't a good medium for storytelling.

You can have good storytelling in games. You can also have good writing in games: Legacy of Kain series, Starcraft 1, Disco Elysium. And these are just a few off the top of my head.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

game devs know jack shit. more news at 11.
just yesterday i was bitching about a dev who advertised its game, quite similar to europa 1400, and he never played it. they don't investigate into the direct closest competition, and you want them to investigate into literature? oh my sweet summer child.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Many Hugo awards winners have writing that makes Divinity Original Sin 2 writing look like Shakespeare in comparison. I do not see how one can argue the fantasy/sci-fi industry as a whole has better writing then the video game RPG industry.

This is 100% true. Fantasy is broadly a dogshit genre filled with crap upon crap. With only minor exceptions like LOTR. 50s-80s sci-fi literature is where it's at. Which is also why more RPGs should be sci-fi instead of dogshit, uninspired fantasy.

High-quality fantasy writing:

• H. Rider Haggard- King Solomon’s Mines, She
• William Morris- The Well at the World’s End
• W.H. Hodgson- The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, nautical horror stories
• Lord Dunsany- Various stories
• Abraham Merritt- The Moon Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, Dwellers in the Mirage, Creep Shadow Creep
• Eric Rücker Eddison- The Worm Ouroboros
• H.P. Lovecraft- Various stories (though primarily horror, secondarily SF)
• Robert E. Howard- Conan the Cimmerian stories, Solomon Kane stories
• Clark Ashton Smith- Various stories
• J.R.R. Tolkien- The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Fritz Leiber- Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories
• Mervyn Peake- Titus Groan, Gormenghast
• Jack Vance- The Dying Earth stories and novels, Lyonesse trilogy
• Poul Anderson- Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword
• Peter S. Beagle- A Fine and Private Place, The Last Unicorn
• Michael Moorcock- Elric stories (1961-1977, in publication order)
• Roger Zelazny- Lord of Light, original Amber novels, Dilvish the Damned stories
• Gene Wolfe- Book of the New Sun (originally published as a tetralogy)

I realised that I have never read the full book nor seen the film of King Solomons Mines. I did read a comic book version when I was 11.

So I downloaded it last night from Gutenburg and started reading it. A couple chapters in and it reminds a bit of an old piece of writers wisdom; all good stories begin with a mystery (something like that, I dont remember exactly how it goes).

I try to make that the case in my game.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Don't think so if I can be honest. Had they read a lot of fantasy they'd be stuck in its clichés and they are stuck in its clichés so they've probably read reasonable amount of it. Also worldbuilding is overrated, but that's beyond that point. The big problem is the inability of the writers to research some topic before writing a setting supposedly inspired by it and the biggest culprit there is obviously Tyranny where a bronze age empire is inspired by 1984 and some shit fantasy books Feargus likes.

 

[v1c70r14]

Non-linear storytelling in an interactive medium is very fucking hard to get right, which explains why nobody really has or is really trying.

I don't think it can be gotten right and that trying to is a fool's errand. Didn't you study to become a writer? No matter how good you are at the craft you'll never hammer a CYOA into literature. The peak of video game agency is letting the player loose within dynamic interacting systems and that requires the writer to stay far away. Putting a banana peel in front of the king and watching him slip down the stairs of his castle is video game "storytelling", being the result of interaction.

Trying to account for every possible player choice with pre-written narratives weakens whatever story you're trying to tell, and it would be a poor one to make it fit within the narrow requirements of a video game plot to begin with. Because there's always a choice or a fork that results in a better story than the other ones, which is something writers are struggling with as a part of their job.

The fetish for player agency doesn't result in better stories, or even more meaningful games, and ultimately video games aren't that great for letting the player tell a story either. There can't be any collaborative process between the player and the developer, not even exquisite corpses. It helps to think about what the most extreme form of player agency would be and it would be to hand them a notepad and a pencil to write a story themselves, then they would finally be liberated from the confines of a video game.

As many other forms of commercial writing outside of the novel, the short story or poetry, it's something done in the service of something else and that immediately puts it in the background. In your case it's the railway put down to send sluts the player's way. You can fork that railway as much as you want, but the player is there for the bimbos in the railcars and with the choice of which track to take they might pick the less scenic route. If you take away the rails and hand the player a gizmo instead to toy with to "tell their own story" you're not writing a great story either.

 

[v1c70r14]

Also worldbuilding is overrated, but that's beyond that point. The big problem is the inability of the writers to research some topic before writing a setting supposedly inspired by it

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one disappointed so heavily by Tyranny. A semi-fictional bronze age is an ideal setting to give flavor to any game, even if it would necessarily stay as flavor. There's just enough known about it to make it exciting and grounded, while offering so many unknowns as to feed the imagination.

The worldbuilding meme is also horrible and comes from RPG nerds misunderstanding Tolkien, thinking that deciding the gravity on the planet where a fairy tale takes place is of the essence, and that deciding how many navels and toes the pseudo-orcs have is deep writing that makes a story richer.

 

[ropetight]

People in entertainment industries are headles lemmings that follow what they think is trend.
It helps them think it mitigates risk of overblown investment that becomes the bigger problem the more money is in the industry.
And they usually misinterpret or downright ridicule what made trend-starting and genre-defining games so popular in first place.
It is hard for them to comprehend that standout success stuff don't come by the recipes or easy way.

In the 90's throngs of indie directors copied something from Tarantino, mostly non-linear montage, soundtrack, and completely ignored his encyclopedic knowledge of movies.

After Diablo, lots of games tried to have arcade fight games with RPG stats, but they usually sucked at atmosphere, bestiarium, itemization and polish.
After WoW, majority of MMO makers tried to copy social aspects, graphical style and setting but completely ignored avalanche of solid content that was delivered in time to keep people interested.
In the end, even the Blizzard forgot what made their games good.

You will occasionally get indie that is worth of your time, but since AAA development budgets went to multiple hundreds of millions - there will be less and less.
Personally, I miss the most works by the studios with 10-50 people, so-called AA.

That niche became infested with woke bullshit that make it easier to get funding from the banks and government.
So now we have bunch of pretend indies and AA that are full of corporate bullshit and lazy copying whatever they think is trendy.
All those bastards deserve to crash and burn as example to the others.

 

[ropetight]

Also worldbuilding is overrated, but that's beyond that point. The big problem is the inability of the writers to research some topic before writing a setting supposedly inspired by it

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one disappointed so heavily by Tyranny. A semi-fictional bronze age is an ideal setting to give flavor to any game, even if it would necessarily stay as flavor. There's just enough known about it to make it exciting and grounded, while offering so many unknowns as to feed the imagination.

The worldbuilding meme is also horrible and comes from RPG nerds misunderstanding Tolkien, thinking that deciding the gravity on the planet where a fairy tale takes place is of the essence, and that deciding how many navels and toes the pseudo-orcs have is deep writing that makes a story richer.

Tyranny at times looks like game that Peter Molyneux would make in the late 90's.
We gave a brilliant catch - you can be evil!
And then the rest of the game is meh at best.

Worldbuilding helps with consistency and not looking dumb in todays time in videos and streams.
Planning, worldbuilding and deep lore give longevity to setting, and it also deeply affects RPG systems that are still the core of the genre.
Can it be overdone? Of course.
But for the RPG's, it is above storytelling on importancy.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

The quantity of literature you read is not a genuine barometer for understanding how to write good ideas. You would perhaps get far more quality by forcing RPG creators to engage in a spiritual practice. That can't be measured. Go on a retreat, and question their most basic assumptions about themselves - look at reality unfiltered by the establishment - feel what they actually feel, not what they are told to feel. Almost nobody would emerge thinking "I love being a corporate SIMP with no backbone". It's vision they lack, not quantity of words. They need to get past all sorts of mental barriers and hangups to realise their output is shit, and rediscover the actual joy of being a geek. Often even the books they have read, will be another idol, their ego can't let go - experts told them to read it, but they didn't understand - looking down on say 'military science fiction' because it's too 'low brow' (according to 'experts'). It's how you get an entire industry thinking 'post-modernist deconstruction' is the highest art, when nobody likes it, or even feels good afterward.

Likewise, if they are mired in material thinking, they will mistake the call for 'profound stories', as a call to insert an ideology that is verbose and midwit.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

I think that modern video game writers only know four types of books:

1. The classics they were forced to read during their English studies (old, white, racist and sexist, so irrelevant).

2. Fantasy books they read in their early youth (old, white, racist and sexist, so they pretend they haven't read them).

3. Feminist and racial literature recommended by The Washington Post/Guardian and so on.

4. Contemporary fantasy from lists like this: https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/8-...s-for-grimdark-fans-to-celebrate-pride-month- 2023/

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Contemporary fantasy has all the bugs.

 

[Reinhardt]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

probably my least favorite of his books. prefer three stigmata.

 

[Faarbaute]

Most people simply don't have anything original or interesting to share anyway, in writing or otherwise.

Could they stand to be more cultured over all? Probably, but that just tends to produce pretentious garbage, as opposed to just regular garbage.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

If they were cultured they wouldn't bother with sci fi, fantasy and videogames in general.

 

[lvl 2 Blue Slime]

My personal view is that I prefer lore and atmosphere far more than the actual story. A good RPG can have a story as simple as "an ancient evil has awoken and a group of heroes must challenge it" and still be good if the world itself is given some thought. I prefer things like a bestiary which tells you the history of each monster, or books in a library which give you glimpses into the world (if you want to read them) rather than having cinematics and conversations shoved into your face like BG3.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

My personal view is that I prefer lore and atmosphere far more than the actual story. A good RPG can have a story as simple as "an ancient evil has awoken and a group of heroes must challenge it" and still be good if the world itself is given some thought. I prefer things like a bestiary which tells you the history of each monster, or books in a library which give you glimpses into the world (if you want to read them) rather than having cinematics and conversations shoved into your face like BG3.

Absolutely agree.

 

[Tyranicon]

I don't think it can be gotten right and that trying to is a fool's errand....

I have a lot of thoughts about this, which can be summarized as:

1. You assume that all writers have the ambition to produce great literature, when modern gamedevs can barely write themselves out of a wet paper bag.
2. There is nothing wrong with producing entertainment for its own merits.
3. On the other hand, art should be meaningful. Perhaps specifically, it should have intent.
4. Perhaps the intent in making art out of video game narrative is to explore the impact of choice.
5. Will this always degrade the quality of the narrative? Do we need a super-genius writer to be able to make it work? I don't think so.

I don't view it as a fool's errand, because that implies that even the attempt itself is meaningless. I would rather consider it a great challenge.

Didn't you study to become a writer?

Yeah, that was completely pointless and a waste of time and money.

 

[Chuck Norris]

I see a common argument in this thread that boils down to this: if video game writers had talent and erudition, they wouldn't write for video games.

But my question is: why do you think that? High-profile video games reach a level of exposure and enjoy a level of analysis that the best writers working today can only dream of.

For better or worse, video game writers (and especially RPG writers) have become the most relevant in the field of speculative fiction. So it's not unreasonable to expect them to be erudite in this field.

 

[Tyranicon]

I see a common argument in this thread that boils down to this: if video game writers had talent and erudition, they wouldn't write for video games.

But my question is: why do you think that? High-profile video games reach a level of exposure and enjoy a level of analysis that the best writers working today can only dream of.

For better or worse, video game writers (and especially RPG writers) have become the most relevant in the field of speculative fiction. So it's not unreasonable to expect them to be erudite in this field.

The problem is not that they don't want to work for video games. It's a combination of hiring practices, company culture and how writers are treated. In a nutshell, if you're a talented writer with above monkey IQ, you're not going to fit in at most AAA or even AA studios. You'll grow to hate everyone there and they'll hate you right back.

Also writers are at the absolute bottom of any media production that isn't just a straight up novel, and even then, publishing terms will gouge you. So why would any self-respecting writer decide to work somewhere for low pay and no respect?

The only reasonable way to go into gamedev as a writer is solo or heading up your own small team. But that takes tremendous amounts of effort and a skillset outside of just writing. I'm not just jerking my own dick here because I do it, it's actually a monumental amount of work. It takes a special kind of person. And the burnout potential is immense.

 

[J1M]

A lot of RPGs don't have interesting world-building or characters, despite there's clearly an attempt to make it that way. Why? Because the people behind them are not well-read in fantasy, sci-fi, horror and mythological fiction. They have not fed their imagination the food it needed and so now, it's lacking. Their main influence are other RPGs, which in turn, are made by people with malnourished imagination. So there's a vicious cycle going on.

So many RPGs (especially the fantasy kind) are just trend-followers and copy whatever is popular atm (like Final Fantasy 16 being a GoT clone), because their makers are philistines and have not tasted what is eternal/classic. Just think of your average RPG: the most literary influence it has is probably D&D literature, which was made for tabletop role-playing. So it has a very artificial/formulaic structure to it.

What I want from my RPG developer is to be well-versed in speculative literature. And I don't mean the popular stuff, like LoTR and A Song of Ice and Fire, but the obscure stuff too. Like the Hugo awards winners, the cult-classics from 60s and 70s. I'm tired of RPG developers putting so much effort into world-building and then delivering something mid.

TL:DR: RPG needs heavy literary influences to flourish in terms of writing/world building. Only well-read people should be allowed to design RPG worlds. If you have not read at least 100 books from the canon of fantasy/sci-fi literature, you have no business even attempting to write RPGs or design their world.

You are delusional if you think the millenial women who make up the majority of game writers and "narrative designers" are playing RPGs. They are also reading a lot more than you think. Bad news: those books are tween love triangle urban fantasy slop.

Yes, Japan is trying to imitate the west and struggling to execute but that is no different from the past.

 

[Gregz]

It's impossible to write a compelling story while being compliant with the california mind virus.

 

[Bad Sector]

The Jagged Alliance games beg to differ.

I don't think it does, the main way you can have an RPG (actually is JA even an RPG? I always felt it was more of a strategy/tactical game, though the same limitations apply to those too) set in a modern setting is if it is in some sort of warzone - there are tons of FPS games (another genre where you "kill stuff") like that too. And it still is much more restricting than fantasy.

Another way to have an RPG in a modern setting is to... add fantasy elements, like VtmB et. al do.