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Some novelists are becoming video game writers and vice-versa
- tiahura 1y agoDoesn’t everyone just hit escape as soon as a cut scene starts?
- seattle_spring 1y agoNo
- dentemple 1y agoSure, if all you're doing is buying the latest Call of Duty iteration/clone. But imagine spending $30 on a story-driven video game and just skipping the story. That's almost as bad as buying a book and never reading it. (Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit).
- Swizec 1y ago> That's almost as bad as buying a book and never reading it. > (Which, to be fair, is a sin that I do, sometimes, commit). Buying books and reading books are separate hobbies. Everyone knows this.
- nkrisc 1y agoMaybe I just enjoy the gameplay. The fact the story was also good is incidental to me (not that I followed the story).
- deadbabe 1y agoIt is worth buying books even if you don’t read them. Having a collection of books waiting to be read is satisfying.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago> But imagine spending $30 on a story-driven video game and just skipping the story. I cannot imagine buying a "story driven videogame" honestly. I love reading and I love stories, but to me the appeal of videogames is to play. Videogame stories mostly just get in the way of the actual appealing fun part for me
- yareally 1y agoNot a fan of the first 3 Mass Effect games? They would feel pretty shallow without the storyline that made you care about the characters
- bluefirebrand 1y agoMass Effect is actually one of the game series that convinced me that video game stories aren't really worth it. Taken as a series, Mass Effect is a pretty bad story with wildly inconsistent writing quality. Taken as individual games they are all pretty good for different reasons, but they don't really form a coherent whole trilogy. I didn't bother playing Andromeda Mass Effect 1 had the worst gameplay, honestly. The shooting mechanics weren't good, the RPG mechanics felt tacked on. It did have the best story and most developed lore and characters though, but they aren't good enough for me to ever want to replay it 2 had the best gameplay imo, but ths story took a nosedive. Some of the characters are alright, but overall it's a really bad story here 3 was probably the middle ground between them. The story picked up a bunch of the hanging plot threads from 1 that 2 wound up ignoring. It also changed the gameplay a bit from 2 in ways that weren't good imo I used to think this sort of thing was the pinnacle of video games. Now I prefer playing stuff like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, where the story is not the focus, but the gameplay is very fun and dynamic
- nothercastle 1y agoWitcher is the best AAA implementation of a great story driving an otherwise decent game. I actually think that cyberpunk was weak mostly because they focused on Star power and the story was meh.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoWitcher 1 might have the best story ever written but I'll never know because the gameplay is tedious Witcher 2 was a serviceable game with a serviceable story Witcher 3 was a vast sprawling story with gameplay that got old fast and it made the story a slog to get through. I had to force myself to finish it I played Cyberpunk four times in a row just because it is so damn fun to actually play and try out different builds and approaches to completing the missions
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- makeitdouble 1y agoThere's a full genre of games that are 99% dialog and cut scenes. You better not skip those.
- Trasmatta 1y agoNo. There are tons of games with great stories and tons of people that love enjoying them.
- TMWNN 1y agoI have never ever skipped a cut scene I have not seen before.
- gxd 1y agoSome games are almost entirely about the story, like mine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
- NikolaNovak 1y agoDepends on game and person, as does everything :). I buy games hugely for stories and characters. But also, cutscenes are hardly the only or for many games even the major place writers can contribute. Look at Disco Elysium with more than a million words written, but also anything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Colony Ship to Days of the Tentacle and Monkey Island and Space Quest, plus Mass Effect and KOTOR, Baldur's Gate and Plascape Torment... Great writing makes for great games :)
- nothercastle 1y agoConsidering how cheap writers are indie games really need more investment in the writing part.
- hippari2 1y agoNo, only you ;)
- makeitdouble 1y ago> Sooner or later, almost everyone I talk to brings up the radically different cultural status of games and books This is why we can't have good things. Too many people are stuck behind the status debate, and in particular caring about status also means protecting norms that might not be beneficial to one's art. Basically, caring about being high brow is IMHO in opposition to being creative and innovative. It can be in small or big ways, but that happens at some level I guess. The more interesting debate to me is where the money is: it's a lot easier to work in a field that can sustain creators, and if the money is in games, game creators will outlast the other field creators.
- sandspar 1y agoIt's The Guardian, a British newspaper for people who consider themselves upwardly mobile. Status anxiety is kind of their thing.
- xrhobo 1y agoI think this is just a human thing. The way science progresses one funeral at a time seems to apply to more than just science. I am actually learning Unreal engine for artistic purposes but I don't really like games. Video games for me are forever linked to growing up playing Atari and 16 bit Nintendo so it is hard to take seriously as art, even while learning Unreal to make art. True creativity, innovation and money usually don't go together. Composer Charles Ives I think is a really good example. Most of Ives life he would have introduced himself as an actuary in insurance. Ives also though probably doesn't make the same music if he didn't have the insurance income. The nature of the taste of the mass market in time almost dictates that only a few true lucky geniuses can be innovate, creative and make a great living all at the same time. We could probably have better things if we mythologized the life of someone like Ives that fits the present economic reality much better than The Beatles or Picasso.
- gwern 1y agoIt's interesting how exactly this seems to parallel the rise of Hollywood in the 1920s-1960s sucking writers out of the rest of the world to work on scripts. The same risk/reward profile, the same looking down on the mass medium, the same blackhole of work if the rest of the massive project doesn't work out...
- chc4 1y agoOne of my personal favorite examples is Seth Dickinson, who wrote some of the lore for Destiny, including the Book of Sorrow and Marasenna in-game lore books, which are IMO some of the best parts of the universe. He then went on to write The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I enjoyed a lot, and more recently Exordia - which is amusingly similar in themes and specific plot elements to the Book of Sorrow and really feels like Seth went "wait I wasn't done with that yet".
- NikolaNovak 1y agoOne of my favorite current authors is Peter Watts. His Blindsight is absolutely sublime and insightful, and I reread it frequently (and get more out of it each time). Apparently he's written for Crysis and his next book is on backburner because Video Games actually pay rent :-).
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- shoo 1y agoWatts is an excellent hard scifi author & a lot of his older writing -- including many short stories, the Rifters trilogy (Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth) and the excellent novel Blindsight are available to read here: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watts-richard-k-morgan-part-one/id1570902818?i=1000663257661 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watt...
- vunderba 1y agoOne of my favorite video games of all time is the Western CRPG Betrayal at Krondor, set in the Riftwar Cycle universe as written by the relatively well-known fantasy author Raymond E. Feist. The deft writing in that game is my go-to example for how to avoid that dime-store novella quality "purple prose," that you see so much in D&D fiction, and it easily holds its own against strong contenders in the writing category (Disco Elysium, Baldur's Gate, etc.). Fair warning if you decide to go play it: spellcasting in the game is almost stupidly OP (cough Skin of the Dragon cough). Still great fun, but the combat is by far the weakest aspect of the game.
- chongli 1y agothe combat is by far the weakest aspect of the game I would correct that to say balance is the weakest part. The open-endedness of the game is one of its strong suits (which is surprising given how it’s written) but there are many opportunities for an enterprising player to break the game. You can make your party fabulously wealthy just by exploiting the merchants in the game and then use the money to deck out the party with overpowered equipment.
- vunderba 1y agoYeah. A LOT of games have that "economic exploit" where you can generate infinite money. But in BAK just barding alone you can get as much money as you need - no tricks involved. The bigger issue is giving the player a "Invulnerability spell" where X mana = X turns, and having the spell block both PHYSICAL and MAGICAL damage. Worse, you can (and I did as a kid) find this spell in the first chapter of the game. If your party gets move priority, there is literally NEVER a reason to not immediately throw it on all three characters. You can even rest WHILE in combat and recover the stamina necessary to cast the spell. Let that sink in for a minute. I used to deliberately skip getting that scroll after I beat it the first time because it made the game trivially easy. Also all long-range physical damage (such as with crossbows) was basically pointless. They should have made it so if you successfully hit with a crossbow, the opponent becomes "temporarily hampered" and it halves their movement speed. As it is, it's trivially easy to engage in close combat with almost every enemy in game. I'd love to see a modernized BAK with more D&D style combat mechanics (attacks of opportunity, flanking, etc.)
- sandspar 1y ago"Phew, this novelist career is too unstable! I know - I'll become a video game writer instead!"
- hackable_sand 1y agoThe tech industry is super unstable so I switched to independent game development. Gonna do something with my skills either way.
- gwern 1y agoThe key is, they are differently unstable. Two unstable careers can combine to a stabler career. While you work on the novel, you collect the check for the video game, say. The challenge always is ensuring that when you serve two masters, you don't wind up serving only one (as happens to many novelists or writers who went to Hollywood, and perhaps now with video game projects...).
- exabrial 1y agoI very much enjoy single player rather than multi. The plot twist at the end of Crysis, when you don’t realize there was an intelligent purpose to a game mechanic… was an absolutely unforgettable moment. I don’t want to put any spoilers… something you took into the entire game suddenly becomes extraordinarily important at the end. Only a great novelist could’ve put that together.
- MengerSponge 1y agoThis is a recurring punchline in Apple's Mythic Quest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythic_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythic_Quest
- kev009 1y agoMarc Laidlaw had a number of novels published before and after going to work for Valve and doing the Half Life thing. "The Third Force" novel and the associated game "Gadget" are probably not well known - but if you liked Myst you might like them. It's a bit more of a visual story than a puzzle game - a bizarre psychological/psychedelic story with stunning for the time graphics (1993 or 1997 depending on the version).
- protocolture 1y agoGoing to lay this out without names, but I have had the opportunity to meet some video game writers, from what I guess you would call the last (or N - 2) generation. I have never before or since met a more self indulgent, greedy, stuck up set of snobs in all my time. People who are exposed to their work might think them interesting, funny people but they were quite serious and believe themselves at the pinnacle of writing. I think the stage has long been set for professional novelists to show up and eat their lunch.
- taeric 1y agoOddly, I suspect the same criticism would be true for many professional novelists? Similar for many professionals of any form, to be honest? Tending towards vain is not at all a trait monopolized by any profession.
- azemetre 1y agoI think the parent commentator is lambasting storytelling in video games as being very poor. I can’t disagree if this is what they mean. Been playing games my entire life and even the most popular games like the Zelda series have average writing. Just because it’s serviceable doesn’t make it long lasting. Even those games with interesting stories like Bioshock or Red Dead Redemption don’t hold a candle to what literature can offer. They all really feel ephemeral compared to books which seem to last beyond the life of their authorship. Are there any games that will be the same? The medium itself means that it’s highly unlikely any of the games will be available in 200 years from now compared to the biology book I have from 1850s that still works fine and still bounded together.
- nothercastle 1y agoBut a mid to low tier sci fi writer can really make an otherwise ok game shine.
- taeric 1y agoDepends what kind of story you want? Games like Slay the Spire didn't need a ton of writing to still have a very fun experience with interesting characters. Ico had minimal story, but an absurdly high atmosphere and emotional impact with what they had. Bastion's story was fun, if farcical. Hades literally won an award.
- charcircuit 1y agoThis article ignores visual novels.
- dimitrisscript 1y agoMythic Quest vibes
- seanvk 1y agoSurprised that there was a lack of mention of Peter F. Hamilton's "Exodus: The Archimedes Engine" - video game "Exodus" https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US/news/agreement-with-random-house-worlds-for-exodus-game https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US/news/agreement-with-random-...
- gabriel666smith 1y agoI would love to write video games (novelist by day-job). The formal possibilities are absolutely fascinating, and so wide, and getting wider by the day with LLMs. ‘Disco Elysium’ is one of the most interesting works of literature I’ve ‘read’ in years, and there’s scope to do so, so much more. The barrier to entry seems confusing, though. None of my agents seem to understand that world (fair enough!). I’ve written whole scripts for games - as writing exercises - but I find the learning curve of the engines too vicious to realistically have time to do a good job of producing a whole game solo. I wonder if anyone has any advice. It doesn’t feel like book / film world, where you get an agent, they shop your story around, etc. I wouldn’t even know where to start, given how many production companies there are. But it’d be incredibly interesting - creatively, and in terms of seeing the other side of the process, the limitations that need to be written around, etc - to work with someone, or a small team. I’d love to try that. There is so much room for innovation in storytelling when compared with writing for the page or screen. (Though I’m certain there are a million dudes out there who think: “I have a great idea for a game!”, lol.)