Decline Is there such a thing as narrative bloat?

[Ravielsk]

Does narrative bloat exist?

Yes, but as far as games are concerned its a bit of a muddy issue. With books or movies its easy to identify and decry because a plot thread or revelation that literary goes nowhere just... well goes nowhere and is therefore just a waste of time and effort on both the readers/viewers part as it is on the authors part.

With games it becomes a bit difficult to quantify because what is the difference between adding detail and bloat? Is letting me know about a characters past when I can never act upon said knowledge bloat or just extra detail for the more engaged? Are in-game books a neat world expansion tool or just bloat when nothing in them ties directly to the game? Does it even enhance the game or does it make it worse by drawing your attention to the fact that it could be so much more?

Skyrim is a prime example of this where if you dig into the various books and NPC inventories it almost seems like a actually detailed RPG. But what does it matter that there are hints to the nature of the Augur of Dunlain or that Movarth has some sort of a backstory to his character when you cannot act on any of it and at best have to larp as if its relevant information in any way shape or form?

Its a tricky topic with no definitive answer. Especially when talking about RPGs.

 

[luj1]

Narrative bloat = lore dumps

 

[Robotigan]

Hm, I would differentiate slow pacing from narrative bloat. Slow pacing is when a game won't let you do shit because you have to sit through some NPC's long-winded soliloquy about why the bad guy is so bad. That's not really bloat. That's just hassling me with too much information before I'm properly invested. Maybe that monologue would even work right after the player finishes a tense series of escalating challenges.

Narrative bloat is like what a lot of YA fiction, comics, anime, and yes some RPGs do. Often the pacing is very snappy and even a bit fast because they're juggling like 20 goddamn ideas at once. There's class warfare, but some people are mutants, and a child must be tortured to protect a city, and robots might be sentient, and there are multiple diverging timelines, and the bad guy wants to end reality because existence is suffering. The whole plot reads like ethical dilemma flash cards.

 

[Silverfish]

Worldbuilding is the cornerstone of any good work of fantasy and sci-fi fiction, dumbass

Not necessarily. The best sci fi and fantasy authors typically just got to the point and didn't sweat the minor details. Tolkien is great and all, but "I've got to deliver 50 pages by Tuesday" has proven to be the best spark for fiction overall.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The best sci fi and fantasy authors typically just got to the point and didn't sweat the minor details.

Such as who?
Asides from Berserk, I genuinely can't think of a good fantasy author that hasn't given enormous importance to worldbuilding
And while I am not very familiar with sci-fi, I do know that it's most celebrated authors also have in common the fact their works have extensive worldbuilding - Dune, Foundation

 

[0wca]

The narrative to a game can be incredibly dense, complex and still be interesting.

It all has to do with how it's presented to the player. If you dump everything at them at the same time, they'll just quit because it's too much information to process.

If you give them the most interesting bits with an option to delve further then it becomes more interesting and engaging.

Ultimately, you first have to have a readable narrative and an interesting lore to begin with otherwise you're just flushing the toilet.

 

[laclongquan]

The best sci fi and fantasy authors typically just got to the point and didn't sweat the minor details.

Such as who?
Asides from Berserk, I genuinely can't think of a good fantasy author that hasn't given enormous importance to worldbuilding
And while I am not very familiar with sci-fi, I do know that it's most celebrated authors also have in common the fact their works have extensive worldbuilding - Dune, Foundation

Berserk has lot of world buildings though. It is hidden beneath the action, and the method is show, dont tell, spread slowly over decades. So readers dont usually notice it.

Icewind Dale (unlike BG series) is not much on world building. You dont need to know ANYTHING about Forgotten Realms to pick up and play IWD series. You barely even need to read on the contents provided ingame.

As for novels... Say, John Ringo's There Will Be Dragon series. Despite being a 5 book series, the world building is not that big or that detailed (compared to David Drake or Robert Jordan). They are sufficient~

 

[JarlFrank]

in fact, in many cases, exposition is put into a story because it needs to explain something and can't find a more nuanced or well-written way to do it. If it's literally required to move the story forward, it's by definition not bloat. That doesn't automatically make it good storytelling, it's just not bloated.

If you cannot find a non-shitty way to convey the information of your story, you are either a shit-tier writer, or your story sucks, or you don't know how storytelling works.
I have never encountered a story that wouldn't work with less exposition. In fact, less exposition only increases the sense of mystery!

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Berserk has lot of world buildings though.

But not to the same magnitude other notable fantasy works have
Not just in quantity and importance, but also the fact the bulk of the worldbuilding (specially in regards to the supernatural) was expanded upon after the "Gold Age" arc (so roughly around the midway of the series)

 

[Denim Destroyer]

An example of narrative bloat would be having a player enter a heavily decorated room, something an artist spent days designing, then proceeding to further describe said room through a text box pop-up. Instead of allowing the players imagination to fill in the blanks the developer is taking the reigns and removing what little ambiguity may remain. Less is more when it comes to writing.

 

[copebot]

Successful fantasy works tend to not have a lot of padding. Even Tolkien puts a lot of the lore-dumping in the appendices. The Silmarillion isn't even really a lore-dump, but a series of shorter mythical stories. Even the parts of the Bible that are "filler" (the long strings of X begat Y) are between actual stories. It's also pretty rare within fictional works in general to just have extended scenes of characters talking at one another. Think about Hamlet: generally, action accompanies the dialogue. You will never see a production of Hamlet in which all the characters are just standing still without moving and talking at one another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a38HZFbhB-M

Right, even in the most inept high school production of Hamlet, there is still more going on in the dialogue between these two characters than in any of the "dialogue" in a recent RPG like Solasta or in a UbiRPG like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (and Valhalla's dialogue is often "good" by the standards of the medium and delivered professionally by qualified actors). Part of the issue may just be that fantasy as a genre has its origins in poetry, and is not really perfectly suited to prose. Faerie Queene, Ivanhoe, anything in Shakespeare, Tolkien: these were all revivals of ancient mediums of poetry. Dark Souls lore is stupid if you take it at face value, but what is not stupid is in how it expresses itself in a more indirect and poet-like voice.

RPG plots get treated as if they were straight modernist works, like you were trying to stage an Ibsen play or a Law and Order episode with elves and dwarves. This is also one of the reasons why Cyberpunk 2077 was kind of lame when you compare it to William Gibson's often dreamlike novels. Sitting around while characters prosedump on you for hours at a time when you are supposed to be in control within an interactive world is just not a good experience and it does not compete well with other mediums.

Imposing a narrative on games also imposes the procedure, trappings, and heightened expectations of narrative. A lot of gears and cogs need to fit together to create a narrative that captivates and moves the audience. It requires more rationalistic trappings and necessarily forecloses many possibilities of independent interpretation. Things have to "make sense" and be "consistent" because that matches what the contemporary mindset believes to be proper. So, what I'm getting at hear is that in the overwhelming majority of games, narrative undermines the experience, and games are at their best when they take more inspiration from mediums that are either nonnarrative or that are much more lightweight in terms of expected narrative structure.

 

[Norfleet]

With games it becomes a bit difficult to quantify because what is the difference between adding detail and bloat? Is letting me know about a characters past when I can never act upon said knowledge bloat or just extra detail for the more engaged? Are in-game books a neat world expansion tool or just bloat when nothing in them ties directly to the game? Does it even enhance the game or does it make it worse by drawing your attention to the fact that it could be so much more?

It's depth when it comes in the form of stuff I can dig up on my own time. It's bloat when it's dumped in my face in the form of an unskippable cutscene right before the boss fight. And it's cancer when it moves me INTO the boss fight out of the tactical position I ordered in preparation for the fight.

 

[Larianshill]

Does narrative bloat exist?

Yes, KOTOR2's protagonist and the countless reasons for why he is special. Just one would be enough, but Avellone couldn't help himself.

 

[Not.AI]

Skyrim is a prime example of this where if you dig into the various books and NPC inventories it almost seems like a actually detailed RPG. But what does it matter that there are hints to the nature of the Augur of Dunlain or that Movarth has some sort of a backstory to his character when you cannot act on any of it and at best have to larp as if its relevant information in any way shape or form?

I was actually thinking of Skyrim & Fallout 3 & 4, among others, when making this thread.

 

[Sykar]

Manuals were better, because they gave you something to read on the shitter, whereas this doesn't work with in-game material.

Just DL the manual on your smartphone and take it with you to the loo.

 

[Silverfish]

Such as who?

I was thinking about guys from the pulp era like Philip Francis Nowlan or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

 

[Terenty]

Disco Elysium did lore dumps the right way. You could invest in Encyclopedia and have it throw in those concise excursions into the history of the world in an engaging, often funny way instead of a dry, Wikipedia like manner most games do. You could often mention that trivia in the conversation too, so it was part of the gameplay, which I thought was pretty cool.

 

[octavius]

My own "favourite" games with narrative bloat is Heroes Chronicles. So much bad fan fiction just to tell the player how his character feels and what his character does, the latter always at odds with what is happening in the game.
But the worst thing is how influential this style were on the user-made maps.

Icewind Dale (unlike BG series) is not much on world building. You dont need to know ANYTHING about Forgotten Realms to pick up and play IWD series. You barely even need to read on the contents provided ingame.

Well, the FR is extremely generic, so unless you are completely new to Fantasy, most of IWD will be fairly familiar.

 

[Lyric Suite]

like a good paper you need to start with tl;dr; that will hook player to read the rest. Or even tldr of tldr

It's funny but i think it is always a mistake to frontload your game with story, text, cinematics etc. Developers ALWAYS do this and it's ALWAYS obnoxious. 99% of people probably just want to get their bearings first before starting their game, change settings, get an hold on the controls and so on.

I'm not opposed to developers just dumping tons of writing on the player, just don't do it right off the bat. And for the love of God make cinematics skippable.

 

[Bohrain]

There are several kinds of narrative bloat in games.
The purple prose kind is the first one. Simple descriptive text has two extra paragraphs because the writer wants to flex his skills in poor allegories and doesn't understand that the player is seeing a 3D model or sprite of the thing he is describing. Numanuma really liked to do this.
The second one is repetitiveness. Persona 5 was structured in ingame monthly arcs, where the first week of each month was just story exposition with basically no gameplay. For some reason they had to repeat all the information of the scenes in text messages at least once. This could've been scrapped and just implemented a basic ingame journal if you needed to check up something.
The third kind is poor pacing of linear narrative in the midst of interactive gameplay. Writing in video games generally serves two purposes, to establish macguffins and point the player to get them, as well as to serve as an alternative form of content in the midst of general gameplay. But since the CD enabled game developers to become shitty movie directors, you end up increasingly more in situations where the player is just whacking a button to skip a cutscene.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

You can apply the criteria "show, don't tell" even just using only text.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Disco Elysium did lore dumps the right way. You could invest in Encyclopedia and have it throw in those concise excursions into the history of the world in an engaging, often funny way instead of a dry, Wikipedia like manner most games do. You could often mention that trivia in the conversation too, so it was part of the gameplay, which I thought was pretty cool.

I second this idea, however, style of the encyclopedia entries should be written in a way that reinforces the game's themes, rather than a direct imitation of the style of Disco Elysium. They should probably be written in the style of the game's other writing and from the perspective of an in-setting character or organization.

 

[Serus]

Narrative quality depends entirely on the skill of the writer. A masterful writer could produce something enormous, with thousands of characters and dozens of divergent plotlines, and it would still be a work of art.

What people have always failed to understand is that writing, not visuals, not music, not anything else, is the most crucial element to any narrative-driven endeavor. The rest are trimmings meant to entice people into spending money, writing is the soul entire.

It's the closest to imitating god. It takes a godly amount of talent.

Is a CRPG, which we are talking about here, a "narrative-driven endeavour" though? Should it be?

 

[Dadd]

RPGs should be written primarily from a worldbuilding perspective, not a narrative-driven one.

 

[NecroLord]

Uuuugh. Diz gaem has to meny fancy wordz. Me like smash stuff.