Culture Clash

(December 2006)

Order of Operations

A disproportionate number of new Culture Clash column topics are spawned by responses to previous ones. Readers frequently comment on my offhand remarks which may have had only passing relevance to the actual subject. For example, in July I said “…Game writing…is frankly depthless and immature because game writing is not considered super-important.”

This observation generated a whole rainbow of emails, from denigration of my comma-conservative style to candid agreements to fuming tirades, so this month I will build a column around someone else's remarks.

Here's a sample of the responses I got.

1. “What about Planescape Torment?” asked one developer.

(Indeed, Torment is very special. It is deep, cerebral and brilliantly written. An exception, to be sure.)

2. “If u want story than read a book jack ass,” wrote another.

(Excellent response to the claim that game writing is immature.)

3. “Story isn't unimportant ,” replied a third, “It's tardy. It's one of the last steps. Fiction is built into a game…games are not built into fiction. Bad stories are inevitable when you have to write your narrative around an existing framework of levels, missions and experiences.”

So true. There's usually a lot of working code before the story even approaches completion. It tends to exist only as an unfleshed skeleton through much of development. A game is usually in pretty good shape before someone is tasked with shoving a story up it. And that story often differs dramatically from original ideas – look at this 2004 preview of Bioshock or this did-they-even-read-the-box blurb for Painkiller.

Irrational's Ken Levine and Obsidian's Chris Avellone both recently and separately remarked on the fact that games tend to be developed sans story until late in the process, at which time a scrim of plot is woven to fit whatever the gameplay structure happens to be. Neither defended the approach; they just said that it was that way. It's funny that Levine and Avellone, two men whose games are famous for richness and complexity of story, are the ones on record about this subject.

Game blogger Bill Harris argues that there's no excuse for shallow storylines, particularly in linear, scripted games like Gears of War. Since we'll all experience it the same way, there's no reason not to include a sharp, engaging narrative. “If [it's] going to be a foot wide,” he says, “it should be a mile deep.” I'm betting that Gears, which has been in concept or development in various forms since the first Unreal, didn't get a story at all until maybe twelve months before it shipped. And since the game was pretty well formed by then, it got exactly the kind of story we expect: a flat, dull, paint by numbers sci-fi tale with rote characters and been-there plot. But what else can you do if you need to jimmy a story into a game that already exists? This is why they write the script before they shoot the movie.

One might argue that story in Gears matters little because the gameplay is so flat-out awesome, or argue further that story in any game matters little because gameplay is the most important thing. I don't disagree, but that argument is a lot like saying that you don't need to put raisins in oatmeal cookies – it's true, but the raisins are meant to enhance the cookie experience. So if you're gonna put raisins in at all, you should use good ones.

A while back, Tom Chick wrote that he doesn't care about game stories because they're usually so bad that he'd prefer to invent his own as he goes along. I'm guilty of the same thing – I've been known to invent stories before I've even played the game. A comprehensive and rather thrilling plotline for Final Fantasy XIII materialized in my head based just on the handful of shots that Square has leaked, and I have no doubt that my story is better (to me) than the mistranslated, androgynous, chocobo-infested cotton candy pap the franchise has come to typify. After all, if we assume that a story will be bad, we might as well train ourselves to invent something better.

But that just encourages the problem. Poor scripts feed into other issues – not the least of which is that it's difficult to be taken seriously as an artistic medium when so much narrative product is very Creative Writing 101. The strange thing is that we have enormously imaginative, talented writers in and around the business, and communities to support them. But their hands are perennially tied by the fact that story in games is an add-on, an afterthought, something to be written late and squished into the preexisting mold of gameplay. And sometimes developers think so little of story that they don't even use the talented writers; they just cobble some adolescent fantasy together and stick it on their game.

If a game is going to be story-driven, it makes sense to work out the story sooner in the development cycle, and continue its evolution throughout the process. It's the only way to ensure that the game is designed to the story rather than the other way around. This doesn't require a sea change in development processes, just a reassessment of the role of narrative. We do call them story-driven games, after all; you'd think that story would be considered kind of important.

In July I said game writing is immature. Then in September I said narratives are evolving. Now I'm again saying that the writing usually sucks. So am I contradicting myself? Actually no. Though it's slowly improving, game writing still has a long way to go. The Levines and Avellones of the world are still few and far between. A couple of developers here and there creating profound fiction is a start, but for the most part fiction is an afterthought. It would be nice to see a few more story-driven games that don't put the burden of creating that story on the player.