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Twaddle, or a short history of bad writing in computer games
Date: 2009-03-13
Author: Merion Jordan
From before the dawn of games
Some of you may remember the eighties. I don't - I didn't appear until halfway through that decade, and spent a fair portion of the rest of it screaming and wetting myself. By the time I was hooked on computer games, through a casual brush with the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D, and then a far less casual brush with the full version of Doom a little later, the early history of gaming had pretty much already been written. Most gamers like to remember its triumphs: Super Mario Bros, the glorious days of the SNES, then the Megadrive, Sonic, all the way up to Half Life, Halo, and WoW.
Chances are the older gamers reading this (the ones in their thirties) have already gone misty-eyed and started to dribble. Luckily for everyone else though, I'm not actually here to make an IGN-style TOP 100 MOST AWESOME THINGS IN GAMING EVER list, but to talk about the seedy underside of computer games, the bit that you never ever talk up to your friends: the writing.
Not all games, of course, actually have anything approaching a plot or dialogue - Tetris, Lemmings, Puzzle Bobble for example - and they never needed one, because they were all about the game, or about twisting your brain and eyes into pretzel-shapes, depending on how long you played them. But these days you'd be hard put to find a 'triple A' title that doesn't have some pretensions to narrative to link together its preposterously contrived levels of fantasy nonsense. So when did this start? When did it stop being enough for a game to just show you a bunch of lemmings, or blocks, or bubbles, and expect you to just get on and do stuff to them?
To a degree, the concept of writing as glue has been there ever since such stalwarts as Commander Keen and the original Wolfenstein
games shovelled you through fifteen gazillion levels of 2D running around and shooting things, and needed some premise to tie them all together.
This usually meant a choice between either preposterously-named aliens or Hitler, and plotlines that hinged on things like android doubles, doomsday weapons, Nazis, or a combination of the three. Much of it was rather lightly meant, mind you - and there have always been games like Day of The Tentacle, the Monkey Island series, or Sam and Max Hit the Road that were entirely dependent on their good writing (mostly of jokes) to make them into the classics they're now seen to be.
Oddly enough, what changed this balance for good and all wasn't the games themselves: it was the influence of films, particularly action films, that started turning essentially plotless blast-em-ups like the original Commando into '
franchised
' and thus more intensively written games like Rambo for the NES. As game hardware advanced and the potential for games to mimic films started to become apparent, it became more normal to get screens of typed-up dialogue scrolling by outside the genres of adventure and role-playing games. There's no precise watershed to this gradual shift in emphasis, since there were games that had plots and dialogue long before then, but once films started leaking into games nothing was quite going to be the same again.
Take the original Doom, for example. Even in 1993 it was entirely unremarkable for a game to contain roughly three screens of text, one at the end of each episode, as a sort of justification for the hours of demon-blasting you'd just chortled your way through. Quake, the spiritual sequel, was equally devoid of cut-scenes, plotlines, dialogue, and whatever the hell else, in 1996. But it was in the mid-nineties that the first bastard offspring of films and games really showed their benighted fizzogs, capitalising on the potentials of actual sound hardware, and a new medium, the CD-ROM.
These were the FMV years.
Frustratingly Moronic Videos
Queen bee in the angry, buzzing hive of newly hatched multimedia horrors was always the Wing Commander series, most notably the installments after Wing Commander 3. Essentially trying to rewrite itself as the Star Wars of video games, WC3 anticipated George Lucas' Sith-based meltdown into ridiculous tosh by the best part of a decade. It isn't all hilariously bad, but you have strange, stilted and largely pointless episodes such as the following (from the WC3 intro):
Scottish Pavarotti (looking at a spaceship upended in the sea): May they rest in peace.
Grunge star in a cape: Peace. Have we ever known anything like that, Paladin?
SP: Not for a long time, laddie.
GSIAC: First the Tiger's Claw, now this.
SP: Enough! You were not to blame for either.
Or this gem (from the same):
Sugar Puff Monster: It warms my heart to see you again, Colonel. But I must excuse myself now, as your duty here takes precedence over our catching up on old times.
Me: Then why bring it up, you cretinous excuse for a rug?
To be fair, making a good film, especially a Sci-fi flick, is difficult even in the best of times, and when you blow most of your game's budget on trying to make it into one, you're probably more rather than less likely to make some real howlers. So the FMV years largely alternated between attempts to pillage the Star Wars franchise and occasional efforts to make soft porn into video games, even while the games themselves went forward by leaps and bounds.
What FMV really brought to the medium, however, was a cross-breeding programme with film techniques and methods on a scale never before (or ever since) realised in games. Voice acting, which was up until that point a relative rarity, became more and more popular. It also brought new and ridiculous sub-genres into being, with things like the 'interactive movie' and the 'rail shooter' sticking out their hideous hybridised heads for the first time. And visual convergence with the cheapest and ugliest of film's step children, the soap opera, brought on a similarly poor choice of character dialog. Consider the silly soft-porn overtones in something like Gabriel Knight 2:
GK (fondling, and being fondled by, a ludicrous blonde in a red dress): Friedrich, I can't just take your date!
F. von Glower (as what can only be described as porn music plays in the background): Why not? I didn't expect her tonight (pause) and for some reason I don't find myself in that mood. Besides, from what you've told me you live like a monk down south at that castle.
(pause) Your body needs some attention.
(Blonde appears to be groping Gabriel Knight, then at F. von G's behest leads him upstairs)
There follows a particularly hilarious scene, to the strains of the same porn orchestra, where the blonde leaves an exhausted, largely unclad Gabriel - and F. von G. enters and lovingly fondles Gabriel's, er, amulet. Which hangs round his neck. Whether the homoeroticism is intended or not, I do know that it's fucking hilarious.
There were games that made good use of FMV, of course: the first Phantasmagoria title was by all accounts a pretty decent game, even if it did look like a low-budget soap opera, and by what I can remember had probably more than its fair share of exasperatingly bland dialogue. Once again though, the games were basically just baldly ripping off the sorts of movie and TV genres that appealed to the stereotypical games consumer, in this case horror, as written by such schlock-pirates as Stephen King. A case in point: both Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria have protagonists who are struggling writers, for fuck's sake.
Well, as we all know, FMV didn't last forever. It hasn't gone by the board entirely, even today, but once again it was the technology that churned the bad writing boat along into a new era, this time the leaps-and-bounds increases in home computing power coupled with the increasing sophistication in rendering techniques, world engines, and the rest of all the technical gubbins involved in making games look more realistic. But only one name led the way, and that name was Valve.
Half-Life: all in the game
Oddly enough, Half-Life was pretty well written, and is one of those games that I don't really have the heart to cruelly lampoon. More importantly, Half-Life was one of the first games to bring the whole game, plot development and all, within the bounds of the game engine. And, ever more oddly enough, it was pretty gripping, hinting at the shadowy, powerful forces that sucked you through the game and spat you out, not into a heroic aftermath, but into a strange limbo. Luckily for this article, though, there were plenty of games that followed suit for whom the words 'narrative complexity' were just another googlewhack.
Even games that were otherwise exemplary in their own genres were prone to this sort of low-rent action nonsense. Metal Gear Solid, renowned for its excellent gameplay, featured a plot that would probably have disgraced Dolph Lundgren in his most workaholic, penniless years: a preposterous group of stereotypes kidnaps a nuclear weapon and holds the world to ransom in order to obtain... somebody's corpse. Among the more spectacular pieces of exposition, we have one that shows a complete disregard for elementary biology:
Colonel Campbell : You've heard of the Human Genome Project. They've been mapping the human genome, and they're nearly finished. Following up on this research, the military has been working towards identifying those genes which are responsible for making effective soldiers.
Solid Snake : There are genes that do that?
Campbell : Yes, and using gene therapy they're able to transplant those genes into regular soldiers.
And, shortly following, there's this heartwarming section, which shows Snake as a, er, warm-hearted dog-lover:
Snake : Colonel, I don't work for the government anymore. Let me go back to Twin Lakes.
Campbell : Why, Snake? Is your life in Alaska all that great?
Snake : There's a dogsled race this week. Next Saturday I have to be in Anchorage.
Campbell : The Iditarod? The longest sled race in the world? When did you become a dog musher?
Snake : Right now my fifty huskies are my only family. I've got to take care of them.
Campbell : Don't worry about your dogs.
I assume that Snake returns home from the mission to find either his dogs starved to death, or a big notice from Animal Welfare stuck on his door. But since they are never mentioned again in any Metal Gear game ever, I'd assume that showing such an episode would be too realistic, and, er, plausible. These two sections, moreover, are just part of the preamble. Those of you not familiar with the rest of the game will be pleased to know that it never gets much more credible.
It wasn't all confined to shooting/sneaking games set in the near/far future either. Just in case you thought it was, here's a chunk of scrolling text from the otherwise excellent Heroes of Might and Magic III:
Forbidding Voiceover Actor : A large Elvish population inhabits Erathia's southeastern coast. Green and Gold dragons, native to the region, augment their military strength. Before we conquer this region, and detour our forces to Steadwick, we must annihilate these dragons. Our Kreegan allies from Eofol requested the honor of this mission. The Kreegans are fierce warriors. They will enjoy the slaughter.
I will point out that this just about makes sense if you've played the game, but that doesn't really salvage sentences like'the Kreegans are fierce warriors': it's quite rare for a computer game to put you in control of a bunch of fantasy soldiers and tell you 'these Kreegans, they're a bunch of pomaded pantywaisters and they're so little use in a fight you'd be better off with a regiment of assorted meringues'. The text above might look fairly innocuous, but imagine if Lord of the Rings had been written like that: 'The orcs are quite ugly. Frodo will not enjoy looking at them,' or 'Sauron is quite nasty. Gandalf would not like talking to him'.In short, Heroes of Might and Magic III is just one of a number of fantasy games - think Diablo 2, or Baldur's Gate 2 - that sets itself in a universe of such epic scope that it can only make cardboard cutouts of its inhabitants. This has its advantages in that people who really, really want to make a personal investment in them can fill out such a universe with their own imaginations, but of course it makes it all sound like a load of ridiculous twaddle for the rest of us.
One of the more carefully imagined such universes is that of Warcraft III. Considering that it was, loosely speaking, a real-time strategy game, a surprisingly large amount of the game's plot was in fact expounded within the game engine, with FMV cinematics only cropping up at the beginning and end of each campaign. Nonetheless, some of the dialogue is pure turkey as this excerpt from early in its expansion, The Frozen Throne, shows:
Spear-carrier (stating the obvious): There, mistress! Those must be the creatures we're after.
Ugly Git: Wretched night elves, you are no match for the Naga!
Angry Person: Naga? Many craven races have tempted our wrath over the centuries.
None have survived!
Ugly Git: Wretched woman. We will retake the surface world and put an end to your
vile race once and for all.
Well, ok, perhaps this exchange isn't so unbearably bad you'd feel obliged to jam your head through your television screen and bite out its electronic innards. But it's not exactly good either, so while most games usually fall on the 'tolerable' side of the ridicule horizon, by and large computer game characters merely talk in the same sorts of half-assed platitudes as the above. And although you'd never sit through that sort of crap in a movie, sitting through it in a game is somehow far easier, letting the nonsense wash over you while you twitch incessantly, waiting to be thrown back into the fray. There's no shortage, in fact, of good games with bad or, at best, highly mediocre scripts. Think Unreal 2, or think Tiberian Sun.
All in all, the move that brought cutscenes into the bounds of the game engine was perhaps the most decisive one for the relationship between computer games and writing in their entire history of twaddle-tastic collaboration. For the first time it was possible to create a game - as titles like Deus Ex showed - that played out in an entirely coherent fashion, articulated within one visual mode, placing the game, its dialogue, its premises and its continuity all together in the same frame of reference. So in turn, the average 'triple A' title was transformed into something that could be scripted and directed to within an inch of its life, further eroding the boundaries between what was a game and what was 'art', and, perhaps most importantly, prodding gaming over the edge into the mass markets it now enjoys. In many respects, barring a few innovations in controllers and graphics, the games of today haven't really travelled very far, concept-wise, from the era of Half-Life and Deus Ex; the difference is that they sell like they never did before.
Money, Money, Money
Some quick facts, cadged from the Entertainment Software Foundation among others: between 1996 and 2006 the US sales of computer and video games rose from $2.6 billion to $7.0 billion; in 2008 that was up to $10.96 billion, with the industry total (including console sales and the like) at something like $21.3 billion. In other words, if there's one thing that separates the games of today from those of yesteryear, it's the sheer amount of money that's being shovelled into them, by both gamers and developers. A big title will usually have a budget of between roughly $10 million and $60 million, but can often expect to recoup that: Halo 3cost about $30 million to make, and proceeded to haul a record $170 million in its first day's sales. It's no wonder that games and movies have grown closer together over the past few years.
The thing is, most of that money never goes near a decent writer. So in Relic's excellent Company of Heroes, for example, all British people are either toffs or cockneys; the introduction to Medieval 2: Total War merely features some monk burbling about tides of war engulfing things, making it an actual step backwards from the silent intro to its predecessor, Rome; and the most beautiful, haunting games of the past few years - Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, for example - have often been altogether devoid of speech and voiceovers. Games today can be incredibly good-looking, and require thousands upon thousands of man-hours to get all the animations and artwork up to their sparkly best, and that seems to be where much of the money goes. But would they pay a decent writer a few hundred euros to script out a halfway-passable intro? Bollocks they would.
One of the best intro movies I can remember seeing was for Silent Hunter IV. It featured Second World War ships and submarines sailing about and blowing each other to shit, but what made it stick in my mind was that, over the top, someone was reading a poem, 'On Time', by Milton. It was somehow so perfectly apt, that slight resonance with films from the period - Night Mail, for example, with Auden reading over the black-and-white footage of mail trains rolling through Scotland - that it became instantly rather sad, and in a slightly daunting way, emotional; so considering that it was probably cheap as chips to make (a few pennies to the voiceover actor and the rest is just another in-game cinematic) it's rather galling that nobody else thought to do it.
But moments like that are rare. There's no shortage of games like Crysis that won't hesitate to whip up a shitstorm of low-rent science fiction to cover the vaguely random ordering of their levels. The intro to Crysis is a prime example of just how close to pointless tripe like Rambo 4 games are trying to get:
Black Man: Ok, listen up gentlemen. Intel reports a significant military presence on the island. We have the element of surprise so let's use it. The North Koreans can't know we're here.
Mockney (laboriously interjecting): They won't even know what hit 'em.
Black Man: Can it, Cockney Twat. Pay attention. This is a covert operation. Our job is to locate and evacuate. We're not at war here.
Mockney: Not yet.
This sort of dialogue would disgrace a 10-year-old's attempt to write a Christmas Play, but it's pretty much par for the course in the gaming world. With audiences in the millions and tens of millions, you'd think that someone would notice the vast discrepancy between the mental ages of the gamers and the offal that's being peddled at them. Games can look like films, they reach the same sizes of audience as films. So why are they generally more stupid than films?
One aspect of it is often down to relevance: most games are made to be games, not interactive films or novels; that is, they are meant to entertain by letting the player do something, not observe something. The story is ultimately still just a side benefit, a "bonus", and so it will often happen that the sections of the game that actually require the attention of a writer will be tacked on in some sense. Yet another way to look at it is that game creators still perceive writing as merely glue to stick the levels together, even though it can often make a plausible script into inadvertent comedy at the drop of a hat.
But there's a deeper problem in all this, in that to ignore the background of a game is to ignore why people play games to start with. The reason that chess is posed as a battle between mediaeval armies, or the Chinese game of Go is set out in terms of two nations expanding into new territory, is because they're just as much food for the imagination as books or films. Most computer games feature the same sort of idea, taken to new heights of depth and realism, exchanging wooden pieces and a chequered board for beautifully detailed moving images of soldiers and worlds. We play games for how they feel, not just for how they look, or sound, or play, and a significant part of that is down to the writing. In short, just like in a movie, each component of a game has to be integrated into the whole for it to work as a complete entertainment experience it is presumed to be.
Pretending otherwise is what makes the plotlines and dialogue feel hastily tacked-on to the legions of animated 3D models that populate today's games, and creates the misguided drive to create picture-perfect worlds that are still as hollow and unbelievable as though they were sketched by two-year-olds. The best example of this that springs to mind is Uwe Boll. You could very easily think of Boll's movies as being the way in which games see themselves, through the magic looking-glass of the silver screen. Women are always incredibly sexy, men are always military and built like brick shithouses, and the blood is served up in bucketfuls. Dialogue, scriptwriting, drama, and artistic merit are behind all these things (pretty much in descending order) in terms of desirability. The fate of mankind is usually at stake. Communication between characters takes place through a complex system of grunting. The obvious will be stated repeatedly. And so on.
And so what? The history of bad writing in computer games doesn't really end with bell-ends like Boll, but it might as well. Despite the fact that writers are usually quite cheap to employ (even fairly decent ones), most games have scriptwriters well down on their shopping lists, somewhere alongside their 17th animations monkey and the tea-boy. But, on the other hand, with more money to hand and increasing amounts of media attention, how long can it be before the average developer realises he can go toe-to-toe with the movies for that ever-elusive goal of artistic prestige?
For some, maybe not long, and for others, maybe forever. There are already games out there whose status as works of artistic genius is already pretty much in the bag, and it's not unlikely that others will follow suit. But considering how even the stupidest of games can continue to haul in cash by the truckload, it's probably a safe bet that the history of bad writing in computer games is by no means over.
- Meirion Jordan
Are you a HARDCORE GAMER? Put your money where your mouth is - get a
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