8 ms·

Don't Run into the Woods

31 points by frantufro 3y ago

kwertyoowiyop 3y ago
there’s something about this writing style that really annoys me and detracts from the message. if you’re going to ignore the rules the payoff needs to be worth it otherwise you’re just being… self-indulgent?
- notnaut 3y ago
  It’s writing. It’s all self indulgence anyway.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    > It’s all self indulgence anyway. ... he writes ... into the void
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  Also, the writer chose to start a new sentence without capital letter.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    But not even consistently.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    Do you think they're doing this for a purpose? Why would you think that they chose to write like that? From what I gather reading the footer of the web page they are a trained writer. Like they have potentially a degree in the English language from a school. What are you getting at with your pile on criticism? Tell us what you really think... About what is acceptable, about what your expectations are, about effectiveness of eliciting and guiding emotional expression.
    - justinator 3y ago
      One can do a lot of good in the World just by reading Strunk.
      - ncr100 3y ago
        Cute and to reinforce my point I think the intention of the author was not to provide a technical treatise but instead to use whimsy to help story writers access their emotions, by invoking and emotional response in them. It is telling to be that this thread of commenters is focused on criticizing the style, here. That's kind of fascinating to me.
        justinator 3y ago
        The style is getting in the way of the message. Did I finish the blog post? I did not. Will I read more from this author? Chances are very low. Sometimes style is the message. I don't think this is a good example of that, as the author is trying communicate unrelated concepts. A better way to do that is, "clearly". What the writing reminds me of is myself, when I was nineteen, in art school. That is not an association you want to have made, as I thought I knew everything when in fact I didn't even know who I was myself. Clever just gets you so far. Show me that you are confident in your writing, rather than hiding behind a messy style that you so desperately want me to be impressed with.
        ncr100 3y ago
        I agree to an extent. I agree that for you style is getting in the way of the message. I don't agree that it's clear from the writing that the author is desperate, or wants to impress you. Instead I speculate that the author does not care what > you < think: I believe that the author is not writing for "you", at least not the you that is in your current state of mind. I speculate that they are writing for somebody who's in a more freeform kind of word poetry state of mind. I mean that's the only kind of conclusion I can come up with reading the article because it is clearly non-strunk & white english. So that leads me to think okay this is probably poetry or prose of some kind of whimsical or rhyming form. And then I reread it and I see the words are closer to a stream of consciousness, as is talked about in other comments here. They're a little bit more structured than a stream of consciousness, in my view because the words appear to evoke feelings like notes in music, to a degree. The overall point of the article, as it appears to be overtly stated in the footer, to help writers to be effective at writing for video games. And this post specifically is about pulling emotions from the writer into the video game that are appropriate to the meandering experience of a player. So I liken the presentation here to be less conventional technical structured writing and more a song or a tune. And that's how I find this article useful.
- gherkinnn 3y ago
  It's one thought per line. A few notes on a topic without the in between words. Works for me.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    why not start with a linear narrative? use all the techniques we already know and feel them in video game form? have you heard of walking simulators? They're just that, with one or two twists. Yet... I'm not saying you should show it to anyone if you're not ready. This sounds like ... rambling. There's no connection between any of the lines. If you're brainstorming, brainstorm. I suspect that's what this is.
    - throwaway626 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ncr100 3y ago
      Wow that's harsh. I don't understand why you're saying that, here. Is this a backhanded compliment? Do you think they're being particularly effective because they're trying to evoke crackheads? I don't think that piece of writing is intended to be a technical treatise on creative writing. Instead, it to me reads as a tool to help technical writers for games to elicit effective story content that has an impact on the player. So I do think their prosaic poetical style intentionally evokes wandering, in order to encourage the reader to mentally wander as a part of their own creative exploration process when writing story content for video games.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        > Wow that's harsh. Totally true. I downregulated the feedback to be a little more kind. My experience living in LA may have colored my response. To address the meat of your response > it to me reads as a tool to help ... I don't see why this even qualifies as tool. There's no summary, not flow of logic, no conclusion really, just some thing a former mentor used to call a "walk through the garden of thought". Sure, the thoughts look pretty to you, but you need to cultivate it for your audience, which usually means getting to the point and providing evidence or information clearly. If you cannot do that, at least be engaging, so that the reader sticks with you until you reach your point. This writing style just doesn't do either of those things. It's confusing to jump from line to line and have to fill in a lot of gaps, it's not easily scanned for relevant points (every line is bolded and separated from text), it just ignores everything we know about presenting information.
- itishappy 3y ago
  I'm in the opposite boat. This style nicely mimics how I think. I find the types of fragment in the article align with the boundaries of each unit of thought in a manner that quite clearly approximates my internal dialog. I think your examples does a disservice, as your breaks do not follow such rules.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Writing down "How you think" is not good general-audience presentation of information. That's probably Journalling. "Writing" is probably supposed to be general-audience presentation of information. By avoiding all rules of presentation, you invalidate everyone's ability to quickly digest the information. I tried to scan this as I usually do, and was forced to read each excruciating, disjointed, malformed line one by one to get to the point. What a mess.
    - itishappy 3y ago
      I do not agree with your definition of writing, nor do I think that was ever the authors intent. Works quite well for me. To each his own, I suppose.
    - throwaway626 3y ago
      [dead]
    - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
      Disagree entirely.
  - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
    This style mimics how I think, but my thinking is a disorganized mess. Before giving my thoughts to somebody else, I usually consider them, sort them, and put them into a form that is easier for somebody else to understand. Usually, this includes a reread and editing. I agree that this writing style mimics thought. I don't want to read disorganized thoughts, though. It's not a huge issue, because the length of this piece is quite short, but if I were to do several minutes of reading this style of writing, I would find it very exhausting, and I probably wouldn't retain most of it, because the lack of organization inhibits my ability to fully internalize it. Most of my disorganized thoughts that I don't really mull over (ie. thinking the same thoughts repeatedly in different orders, and considering many different aspects of them) or organize into a written form, I also don't retain. I lose them forever. If I was sharing them with somebody else, I don't think I'd keep them in the format that's most easily forgotten. For personal journaling, it's fine enough, but I don't find it really a compelling write-up of the age-old premise "Don't overthink it, just get started. If you overthink it, you might never finish, or might even never really start." It's not really much different from the famous "Shitty First Drafts" paper[0]. [0]: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
- Omroth 3y ago
  It's the bold that really puts me off.
  - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    Really? I find that it makes it so much more pleasant and easy to read. I read it much faster than I would have without bold. The author is telling you which parts of the sentence are most important, so your brain frees up that processing part where you have to figure that out.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  I agree I hate this style and the bold words make it slower to read. If you hold so much, then everything else is just fluff so get rid of it.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    That reduction in process is ineffective when participating in introspection. This is a blog about marrying creativity and technicality, guiding writers who are creating story content for video games. In this case the author appears to be attempting to help encourage the reader to be introspective and uncover their own feelings as their play testing in progress video games, as part of the development of story content, in order to facilitate expressing human emotions. Human emotions are notoriously tricky to express. People can go their whole lives without developing emotional intelligence. I would imagine that effective storytelling about people involves a certain amount of emotional intelligence. This article to me is instruction on training one's own emotional intelligence. What do you think about that?
    - ghodith 3y ago
      Are you the author? Somewhat strange to so defensively respond to every critical comment in this thread in the same manner.
      - ncr100 3y ago
        I'm not the author. Yeah it is strange. I've been thinking about that too, while writing them. I believe that I'm using this opportunity to understand rejecting criticality, as it relates to intention. To go deeper, I think I frankly am lonely, and also feel pain about the dissonance between the commentary .. talking on this thread about the style of the author and missing the point of the author. That touches me in a sensitive place, related to the loneliness, where in my personal life I sometimes don't feel like I'm being heard in spite of my best efforts. Also some abandonment history. :P Recently I took a 16personalities.com test and it gave me infp, And you know those tests are just like a slice of inside into you, not the whole picture. But it gave me an opportunity to think about some of the difficulties that I've had throughout my life socializing and how I have adapted to them. Largely around where I have some visionary optimistic idea and the responses a bunch of "poo poo's" from those around me, if you know what I mean? Resulting in me feeling rejection, and throughout my life trying to make sense of why. So it's top of mind. Does this make sense?
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  I think its a writing style developed from how people communicate in irc type interfaces. At least it seems familiar to me based on how I communicate ideas to my friends and family on discord/facebook/whatsapp etc I won't speak to it's merits or problems, but just point out that I didn't find it hard to parse, perhaps because its familliar to me?
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  This was filed under `daily`, so it's probably someone desperately trying to hit their words-per-day goal. At that point, all bets are off.
- mpalmer 3y ago
  My theory - based on nothing - is that a lot of people "think in video" now. They don't read writing, they read subtitles. So when they write, what they're doing is narrating the images and ideas playing out like a movie in their head. Unfortunately most narration needs pairing with an image to make sense.
  - ncr100 3y ago
    I do agree that people think differently these days vs 20 years ago, based on my own personal experience which is not nothing, and I would argue your "based on nothing" is based on your personal experience :-) I like this articles point that the emotion of the moment is really what matters and the challenge for writers is to identify the emotion that is evoked through the wide smattering of situations a dynamic video game puts its players through. I think it goes beyond video. Back to speculating about society and its thinking, we spend a lot of time consuming media packages presented to us on our cell phones or tablets or computers. That's a repetitive process. This sounds like training to me. The mode is a screen or two screens if you've got multiple monitors, some kind of touch or hand-driven browsing device might come out or a touch screen. And yeah, the images can flicker on the screen like a captivating campfire, engorging you in a dazzling array of light and sound which can tickle your funny bone or involve you in a sad moment. It's like life for all of us media consumers has become predictable, because you can visit and revisit these experiences. Life of course is not that predictable, it is chaotic and as adults we only learn how to protect against the radically horrible potential outcomes of life through skills and learning from other people's mistakes.
- Perz1val 3y ago
  I often read texts (blogs, articles, long comments, etc) out of order, skipping whole paragraphs, coming back if I feel like I missed a detail. Just going fast. This post is entirely incompatible with that. Not only that, the combination of thin, serif, monospace font on a white background is distracting, but also like 1/4th of the text is bolded, further messing up how I think what is important. Like it is trying to "force itself" on me - that automatically causes me to "resist" by skipping even more... and there's the bottom of the page. (quoted words are far too strong, but you should get the idea) I'm sure the author didn't intend that, it's just that how I read things being deeply incompatible with their style. I do read some things "the normal way", but that requires either the text being densely packed, or a linear story.
  - rileymat2 3y ago
    > coming back if I feel like I missed a detail How do you know you are not missing a ton of important meaning? I feel like I know people that do this and are clearly missing major points by substituting their on beliefs in.
    - Notatheist 3y ago
      We do miss out on a ton of important meaning. On the other hand we skip over a ton of unimportant meaning writers bloat their articles with. I need paragraphs and sentence structure as a kind of bounding volume hierarchy though...
    - Perz1val 3y ago
      I don't, but getting even as little as 80% of 2 articles in the time required to read one is a 60% gain.
- ncr100 3y ago
  TL;DR this complex reaction of annoyance shared here is perhaps the most valuable piece of information in this article to you, and is potentially beneficial insight to you. > ... you’re going to ignore the rules Why share a nearly entirely unconstructive critical, mocking, and shaming discussion point in a public forum? To be clear, it's okay by me to do so .. it's just odd to me. It stands out as unhelpful, unexpected, and confusing and so to dig into what's interesting about it, it makes me wonder what's going on for you personally, and so I'm asking about it. About the article: everybody is different. How people express themselves differs widely. What they are saying however approaches reasonablely concrete shared meaning based on context. In this case there is a writer who is talking about conveying emotion in the challenging medium of video games / interactive entertainment software, overtly for the purpose of being helpful supporting scriptwriters engaged in that field. Through the blog in question, they effectively express a meandering open-minded approach to eliciting one's own thoughts and feelings, as a writer, in whatever genre the game itself ends up being in order to appropriately honor the characters of the game. Their use of white space and lack of punctuation suggests this openness, to me. You, here, implicitly state that you know or have decided what 'the rules' are for other people who are writing their own missives. Some provocative thoughts for discussion: Is this criticality really neuroticism? Are your comments reflecting society's recently hot-topic flirtations with authoritarianism? Are your habits influencing this criticality: what are your personal habits towards socialization trending towards, in-person to see people's faces or are you primarily using communication techniques that don't offer you the opportunity today to experience other people's emotions? There seems to be a lot of similarities between the few criticisms (especially self-indulgence) that this hacker news comment lodges against the author and your own comment. That makes this a fascinating piece of art.
- frantufro 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, we’re all learning in this world. I’ll try to do better in the coming emails. Cheers!
  - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
    The style doesn't work for me, but if you have an audience that likes the style, I'd encourage you to either stick with it or at least (somehow) ask that existing audience what they think about any change. Even the subject of your post is narrative-driven games, which already also aren't for everybody. When you're making something special specifically for the people who like that special kind of thing, deviating from that to be more accessible, or achieve a greater audience, or even to be more "effective" can be a path to diluting what you're doing, and spoiling what is special about it. The criticism and feedback are correct; they are things that kept the words from really working for that reader. They also prevented the post from really working for me. I don't believe, however, that I need to be the audience. If you are doing something different from everybody else, in a unique style, it feels to me that it would be a little sad for that uniqueness to go away, even if I'm not a part of it. Like a species of a bird that I have never seen and never will see going extinct is still a sad thing. I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just saying that criticism can be right, correct, and valid, and the right thing to do can still sometimes be to not take the advice, even when it's factually correct.
doodpants 3y ago
I grew up playing Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and the like. For me, the whole point of a video game is the gameplay, not some story that the creator wants to tell. I barely tolerate narrative in video games, and mercilessly skip cutscenes whenever possible. I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". But maybe that's just me.
- troelsSteegin 3y ago
  The Wikipedia article on "walking simulators", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator, suggests it's not just you.
- falcolas 3y ago
  > I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". Yeah, they're a fairly niche method of storytelling, just a bit more involved than Visual Novels (which themselves are roughly a choose-your-own-adventure comic book). Their gameplay focuses very heavily on exploration. But some of those stories are really well told using these mediums. Having to use my player "agency" to re-enact the deaths of family members in Gone Home was really hard in some cases.
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  > I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". Me either, but I have nothing against people who enjoy them, and it does seem like a fun enough writing exercise to create one as a writer. Not everything needs to be for me. I never want to play a walking simulator, but nobody's making me, so whatever.
troelsSteegin 3y ago
I interpreted this advice to just start simple - to describe the experience you intend before designing the state machine to support it.
RugnirViking 3y ago
There is a fun to be had with games divorced almost entirely from any storytelling though. For example various abstract strategy games I play like rule the waves, or games like rocket league. The fun there is not largely enhanced by the fantasy of it, I think. The mechanics themselves are the challenge, and overcoming them and creating things using them is the fun, something that is more abstract with books (you'd have to go to fanfic or fanart etc) I do appreciate though that this is written for a prospective author thinking of making the leap to writing for video games. They'd probably be interested more in the creation of narrative games. But maybe its worth considering how what I mentioned before can contribute to a narrative. An example that comes to mind is how in some simple games, items have a description that has some lore or a little joke. It reinforces the already existing player desire to explore and discover items, and makes it fun to see what each new one says. The key point here is that the descriptions don't even have to be good for this to work
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I haven’t really enjoyed the actual plot of very many video games at all. When I have tried to watch cutscenes and dialog, it has typically been pretty shallow stuff. In my head, the plot of the game is the imagined story of my guy. The cutscenes and whatnot, that’s just somebody else’s fanfic about my guy, a much better character that exists in my head. Environmental storytelling can be pretty good, though. The FromSoft games did a great job of setting up environments that evoke the feeling of a type of world, you fill in the blanks, despite having basically incoherent actual plots.
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    I concur, I'm not sure I could even tell you the plot of many of the games I've played, even solid crpgs ostensibly based on plot like the bioware games. They had great stories everyone agrees, but I mostly was just playing for the meta game. But item descriptions and dialog, good writing there can totally make or break a game for me. A whole coherent story is second to the texture of the world that interactions create.
    - 3y ago
riidom 3y ago
https://onwriting.games/atom.xml https://onwriting.games/atom.xml a bit hidden
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  Yeah, my RSS extension didn't pick it up. I think it's because the alternate link had type=atom+xml instead of type=application/atom+xml
  - frantufro 3y ago
    Thanks!
- frantufro 3y ago
  You’re right. I should add a link in the footer! I can’t believe I forgot about it! Thanks :)
k_roy 3y ago
out of everything here, I think it's this line that bugged me the most: "in a book (or movie or tv show) the reader can either keep reading, or stop. that's it. that's as far as their agency can go." At best, this is overly naive. At worst, it feels like intellectual dishonesty. I can start or I can stop. I can rewind a chapter, forget about it for a month, pass out listening to an audio book. Some times, depending on my mood, the book, and my interaction with that book can be dramatically different. And all these things are going to change my perception and interaction with that book. Even if it's a book I've read before and know how it ends, there is a lot more that feed into "agency" than just 100% on or off.
- frantufro 3y ago
  I like what you’re saying. I’ll think a bit more about this and see if it changes the point I’m making in any significant way, otherwise I’ll correct the statement in a future email. Is it ok if I mention your comment there?
saleemkt 3y ago
but I'm confused by that.

31 points by frantufro 3y ago

there’s something about this writing style that really annoys me and detracts from the message. if you’re going to ignore the rules the payoff needs to be worth it otherwise you’re just being… self-indulgent?

notnaut 3y ago
It’s writing. It’s all self indulgence anyway.
- itishappy 3y ago
  > It’s all self indulgence anyway. ... he writes ... into the void
Alifatisk 3y ago
Also, the writer chose to start a new sentence without capital letter.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  But not even consistently.
- ncr100 3y ago
  Do you think they're doing this for a purpose? Why would you think that they chose to write like that? From what I gather reading the footer of the web page they are a trained writer. Like they have potentially a degree in the English language from a school. What are you getting at with your pile on criticism? Tell us what you really think... About what is acceptable, about what your expectations are, about effectiveness of eliciting and guiding emotional expression.
  - justinator 3y ago
    One can do a lot of good in the World just by reading Strunk.
    - ncr100 3y ago
      Cute and to reinforce my point I think the intention of the author was not to provide a technical treatise but instead to use whimsy to help story writers access their emotions, by invoking and emotional response in them. It is telling to be that this thread of commenters is focused on criticizing the style, here. That's kind of fascinating to me.
      - justinator 3y ago
        The style is getting in the way of the message. Did I finish the blog post? I did not. Will I read more from this author? Chances are very low. Sometimes style is the message. I don't think this is a good example of that, as the author is trying communicate unrelated concepts. A better way to do that is, "clearly". What the writing reminds me of is myself, when I was nineteen, in art school. That is not an association you want to have made, as I thought I knew everything when in fact I didn't even know who I was myself. Clever just gets you so far. Show me that you are confident in your writing, rather than hiding behind a messy style that you so desperately want me to be impressed with.
        ncr100 3y ago
        I agree to an extent. I agree that for you style is getting in the way of the message. I don't agree that it's clear from the writing that the author is desperate, or wants to impress you. Instead I speculate that the author does not care what > you < think: I believe that the author is not writing for "you", at least not the you that is in your current state of mind. I speculate that they are writing for somebody who's in a more freeform kind of word poetry state of mind. I mean that's the only kind of conclusion I can come up with reading the article because it is clearly non-strunk & white english. So that leads me to think okay this is probably poetry or prose of some kind of whimsical or rhyming form. And then I reread it and I see the words are closer to a stream of consciousness, as is talked about in other comments here. They're a little bit more structured than a stream of consciousness, in my view because the words appear to evoke feelings like notes in music, to a degree. The overall point of the article, as it appears to be overtly stated in the footer, to help writers to be effective at writing for video games. And this post specifically is about pulling emotions from the writer into the video game that are appropriate to the meandering experience of a player. So I liken the presentation here to be less conventional technical structured writing and more a song or a tune. And that's how I find this article useful.
gherkinnn 3y ago
It's one thought per line. A few notes on a topic without the in between words. Works for me.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  why not start with a linear narrative? use all the techniques we already know and feel them in video game form? have you heard of walking simulators? They're just that, with one or two twists. Yet... I'm not saying you should show it to anyone if you're not ready. This sounds like ... rambling. There's no connection between any of the lines. If you're brainstorming, brainstorm. I suspect that's what this is.
  - throwaway626 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ncr100 3y ago
    Wow that's harsh. I don't understand why you're saying that, here. Is this a backhanded compliment? Do you think they're being particularly effective because they're trying to evoke crackheads? I don't think that piece of writing is intended to be a technical treatise on creative writing. Instead, it to me reads as a tool to help technical writers for games to elicit effective story content that has an impact on the player. So I do think their prosaic poetical style intentionally evokes wandering, in order to encourage the reader to mentally wander as a part of their own creative exploration process when writing story content for video games.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      > Wow that's harsh. Totally true. I downregulated the feedback to be a little more kind. My experience living in LA may have colored my response. To address the meat of your response > it to me reads as a tool to help ... I don't see why this even qualifies as tool. There's no summary, not flow of logic, no conclusion really, just some thing a former mentor used to call a "walk through the garden of thought". Sure, the thoughts look pretty to you, but you need to cultivate it for your audience, which usually means getting to the point and providing evidence or information clearly. If you cannot do that, at least be engaging, so that the reader sticks with you until you reach your point. This writing style just doesn't do either of those things. It's confusing to jump from line to line and have to fill in a lot of gaps, it's not easily scanned for relevant points (every line is bolded and separated from text), it just ignores everything we know about presenting information.
itishappy 3y ago
I'm in the opposite boat. This style nicely mimics how I think. I find the types of fragment in the article align with the boundaries of each unit of thought in a manner that quite clearly approximates my internal dialog. I think your examples does a disservice, as your breaks do not follow such rules.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Writing down "How you think" is not good general-audience presentation of information. That's probably Journalling. "Writing" is probably supposed to be general-audience presentation of information. By avoiding all rules of presentation, you invalidate everyone's ability to quickly digest the information. I tried to scan this as I usually do, and was forced to read each excruciating, disjointed, malformed line one by one to get to the point. What a mess.
  - itishappy 3y ago
    I do not agree with your definition of writing, nor do I think that was ever the authors intent. Works quite well for me. To each his own, I suppose.
  - throwaway626 3y ago
    [dead]
  - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    Disagree entirely.
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  This style mimics how I think, but my thinking is a disorganized mess. Before giving my thoughts to somebody else, I usually consider them, sort them, and put them into a form that is easier for somebody else to understand. Usually, this includes a reread and editing. I agree that this writing style mimics thought. I don't want to read disorganized thoughts, though. It's not a huge issue, because the length of this piece is quite short, but if I were to do several minutes of reading this style of writing, I would find it very exhausting, and I probably wouldn't retain most of it, because the lack of organization inhibits my ability to fully internalize it. Most of my disorganized thoughts that I don't really mull over (ie. thinking the same thoughts repeatedly in different orders, and considering many different aspects of them) or organize into a written form, I also don't retain. I lose them forever. If I was sharing them with somebody else, I don't think I'd keep them in the format that's most easily forgotten. For personal journaling, it's fine enough, but I don't find it really a compelling write-up of the age-old premise "Don't overthink it, just get started. If you overthink it, you might never finish, or might even never really start." It's not really much different from the famous "Shitty First Drafts" paper[0]. [0]: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
Omroth 3y ago
It's the bold that really puts me off.
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  Really? I find that it makes it so much more pleasant and easy to read. I read it much faster than I would have without bold. The author is telling you which parts of the sentence are most important, so your brain frees up that processing part where you have to figure that out.
asylteltine 3y ago
I agree I hate this style and the bold words make it slower to read. If you hold so much, then everything else is just fluff so get rid of it.
- ncr100 3y ago
  That reduction in process is ineffective when participating in introspection. This is a blog about marrying creativity and technicality, guiding writers who are creating story content for video games. In this case the author appears to be attempting to help encourage the reader to be introspective and uncover their own feelings as their play testing in progress video games, as part of the development of story content, in order to facilitate expressing human emotions. Human emotions are notoriously tricky to express. People can go their whole lives without developing emotional intelligence. I would imagine that effective storytelling about people involves a certain amount of emotional intelligence. This article to me is instruction on training one's own emotional intelligence. What do you think about that?
  - ghodith 3y ago
    Are you the author? Somewhat strange to so defensively respond to every critical comment in this thread in the same manner.
    - ncr100 3y ago
      I'm not the author. Yeah it is strange. I've been thinking about that too, while writing them. I believe that I'm using this opportunity to understand rejecting criticality, as it relates to intention. To go deeper, I think I frankly am lonely, and also feel pain about the dissonance between the commentary .. talking on this thread about the style of the author and missing the point of the author. That touches me in a sensitive place, related to the loneliness, where in my personal life I sometimes don't feel like I'm being heard in spite of my best efforts. Also some abandonment history. :P Recently I took a 16personalities.com test and it gave me infp, And you know those tests are just like a slice of inside into you, not the whole picture. But it gave me an opportunity to think about some of the difficulties that I've had throughout my life socializing and how I have adapted to them. Largely around where I have some visionary optimistic idea and the responses a bunch of "poo poo's" from those around me, if you know what I mean? Resulting in me feeling rejection, and throughout my life trying to make sense of why. So it's top of mind. Does this make sense?
RugnirViking 3y ago
I think its a writing style developed from how people communicate in irc type interfaces. At least it seems familiar to me based on how I communicate ideas to my friends and family on discord/facebook/whatsapp etc I won't speak to it's merits or problems, but just point out that I didn't find it hard to parse, perhaps because its familliar to me?
jvanderbot 3y ago
This was filed under `daily`, so it's probably someone desperately trying to hit their words-per-day goal. At that point, all bets are off.
mpalmer 3y ago
My theory - based on nothing - is that a lot of people "think in video" now. They don't read writing, they read subtitles. So when they write, what they're doing is narrating the images and ideas playing out like a movie in their head. Unfortunately most narration needs pairing with an image to make sense.
- ncr100 3y ago
  I do agree that people think differently these days vs 20 years ago, based on my own personal experience which is not nothing, and I would argue your "based on nothing" is based on your personal experience :-) I like this articles point that the emotion of the moment is really what matters and the challenge for writers is to identify the emotion that is evoked through the wide smattering of situations a dynamic video game puts its players through. I think it goes beyond video. Back to speculating about society and its thinking, we spend a lot of time consuming media packages presented to us on our cell phones or tablets or computers. That's a repetitive process. This sounds like training to me. The mode is a screen or two screens if you've got multiple monitors, some kind of touch or hand-driven browsing device might come out or a touch screen. And yeah, the images can flicker on the screen like a captivating campfire, engorging you in a dazzling array of light and sound which can tickle your funny bone or involve you in a sad moment. It's like life for all of us media consumers has become predictable, because you can visit and revisit these experiences. Life of course is not that predictable, it is chaotic and as adults we only learn how to protect against the radically horrible potential outcomes of life through skills and learning from other people's mistakes.
Perz1val 3y ago
I often read texts (blogs, articles, long comments, etc) out of order, skipping whole paragraphs, coming back if I feel like I missed a detail. Just going fast. This post is entirely incompatible with that. Not only that, the combination of thin, serif, monospace font on a white background is distracting, but also like 1/4th of the text is bolded, further messing up how I think what is important. Like it is trying to "force itself" on me - that automatically causes me to "resist" by skipping even more... and there's the bottom of the page. (quoted words are far too strong, but you should get the idea) I'm sure the author didn't intend that, it's just that how I read things being deeply incompatible with their style. I do read some things "the normal way", but that requires either the text being densely packed, or a linear story.
- rileymat2 3y ago
  > coming back if I feel like I missed a detail How do you know you are not missing a ton of important meaning? I feel like I know people that do this and are clearly missing major points by substituting their on beliefs in.
  - Notatheist 3y ago
    We do miss out on a ton of important meaning. On the other hand we skip over a ton of unimportant meaning writers bloat their articles with. I need paragraphs and sentence structure as a kind of bounding volume hierarchy though...
  - Perz1val 3y ago
    I don't, but getting even as little as 80% of 2 articles in the time required to read one is a 60% gain.
ncr100 3y ago
TL;DR this complex reaction of annoyance shared here is perhaps the most valuable piece of information in this article to you, and is potentially beneficial insight to you. > ... you’re going to ignore the rules Why share a nearly entirely unconstructive critical, mocking, and shaming discussion point in a public forum? To be clear, it's okay by me to do so .. it's just odd to me. It stands out as unhelpful, unexpected, and confusing and so to dig into what's interesting about it, it makes me wonder what's going on for you personally, and so I'm asking about it. About the article: everybody is different. How people express themselves differs widely. What they are saying however approaches reasonablely concrete shared meaning based on context. In this case there is a writer who is talking about conveying emotion in the challenging medium of video games / interactive entertainment software, overtly for the purpose of being helpful supporting scriptwriters engaged in that field. Through the blog in question, they effectively express a meandering open-minded approach to eliciting one's own thoughts and feelings, as a writer, in whatever genre the game itself ends up being in order to appropriately honor the characters of the game. Their use of white space and lack of punctuation suggests this openness, to me. You, here, implicitly state that you know or have decided what 'the rules' are for other people who are writing their own missives. Some provocative thoughts for discussion: Is this criticality really neuroticism? Are your comments reflecting society's recently hot-topic flirtations with authoritarianism? Are your habits influencing this criticality: what are your personal habits towards socialization trending towards, in-person to see people's faces or are you primarily using communication techniques that don't offer you the opportunity today to experience other people's emotions? There seems to be a lot of similarities between the few criticisms (especially self-indulgence) that this hacker news comment lodges against the author and your own comment. That makes this a fascinating piece of art.
frantufro 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback, we’re all learning in this world. I’ll try to do better in the coming emails. Cheers!
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  The style doesn't work for me, but if you have an audience that likes the style, I'd encourage you to either stick with it or at least (somehow) ask that existing audience what they think about any change. Even the subject of your post is narrative-driven games, which already also aren't for everybody. When you're making something special specifically for the people who like that special kind of thing, deviating from that to be more accessible, or achieve a greater audience, or even to be more "effective" can be a path to diluting what you're doing, and spoiling what is special about it. The criticism and feedback are correct; they are things that kept the words from really working for that reader. They also prevented the post from really working for me. I don't believe, however, that I need to be the audience. If you are doing something different from everybody else, in a unique style, it feels to me that it would be a little sad for that uniqueness to go away, even if I'm not a part of it. Like a species of a bird that I have never seen and never will see going extinct is still a sad thing. I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just saying that criticism can be right, correct, and valid, and the right thing to do can still sometimes be to not take the advice, even when it's factually correct.

doodpants 3y ago

I grew up playing Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and the like. For me, the whole point of a video game is the gameplay, not some story that the creator wants to tell. I barely tolerate narrative in video games, and mercilessly skip cutscenes whenever possible. I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". But maybe that's just me.

troelsSteegin 3y ago
The Wikipedia article on "walking simulators", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_simulator, suggests it's not just you.
falcolas 3y ago
> I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". Yeah, they're a fairly niche method of storytelling, just a bit more involved than Visual Novels (which themselves are roughly a choose-your-own-adventure comic book). Their gameplay focuses very heavily on exploration. But some of those stories are really well told using these mediums. Having to use my player "agency" to re-enact the deaths of family members in Gone Home was really hard in some cases.
LegibleCrimson 3y ago
> I have no interest in playing any of these so-called "walking simulators". Me either, but I have nothing against people who enjoy them, and it does seem like a fun enough writing exercise to create one as a writer. Not everything needs to be for me. I never want to play a walking simulator, but nobody's making me, so whatever.

troelsSteegin 3y ago

I interpreted this advice to just start simple - to describe the experience you intend before designing the state machine to support it.

RugnirViking 3y ago

There is a fun to be had with games divorced almost entirely from any storytelling though. For example various abstract strategy games I play like rule the waves, or games like rocket league. The fun there is not largely enhanced by the fantasy of it, I think. The mechanics themselves are the challenge, and overcoming them and creating things using them is the fun, something that is more abstract with books (you'd have to go to fanfic or fanart etc) I do appreciate though that this is written for a prospective author thinking of making the leap to writing for video games. They'd probably be interested more in the creation of narrative games. But maybe its worth considering how what I mentioned before can contribute to a narrative. An example that comes to mind is how in some simple games, items have a description that has some lore or a little joke. It reinforces the already existing player desire to explore and discover items, and makes it fun to see what each new one says. The key point here is that the descriptions don't even have to be good for this to work

bee_rider 3y ago
I haven’t really enjoyed the actual plot of very many video games at all. When I have tried to watch cutscenes and dialog, it has typically been pretty shallow stuff. In my head, the plot of the game is the imagined story of my guy. The cutscenes and whatnot, that’s just somebody else’s fanfic about my guy, a much better character that exists in my head. Environmental storytelling can be pretty good, though. The FromSoft games did a great job of setting up environments that evoke the feeling of a type of world, you fill in the blanks, despite having basically incoherent actual plots.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  I concur, I'm not sure I could even tell you the plot of many of the games I've played, even solid crpgs ostensibly based on plot like the bioware games. They had great stories everyone agrees, but I mostly was just playing for the meta game. But item descriptions and dialog, good writing there can totally make or break a game for me. A whole coherent story is second to the texture of the world that interactions create.
  - 3y ago

riidom 3y ago

https://onwriting.games/atom.xml https://onwriting.games/atom.xml a bit hidden

LegibleCrimson 3y ago
Yeah, my RSS extension didn't pick it up. I think it's because the alternate link had type=atom+xml instead of type=application/atom+xml
- frantufro 3y ago
  Thanks!
frantufro 3y ago
You’re right. I should add a link in the footer! I can’t believe I forgot about it! Thanks :)

k_roy 3y ago

out of everything here, I think it's this line that bugged me the most: "in a book (or movie or tv show) the reader can either keep reading, or stop. that's it. that's as far as their agency can go." At best, this is overly naive. At worst, it feels like intellectual dishonesty. I can start or I can stop. I can rewind a chapter, forget about it for a month, pass out listening to an audio book. Some times, depending on my mood, the book, and my interaction with that book can be dramatically different. And all these things are going to change my perception and interaction with that book. Even if it's a book I've read before and know how it ends, there is a lot more that feed into "agency" than just 100% on or off.

frantufro 3y ago
I like what you’re saying. I’ll think a bit more about this and see if it changes the point I’m making in any significant way, otherwise I’ll correct the statement in a future email. Is it ok if I mention your comment there?

saleemkt 3y ago

but I'm confused by that.