What can change the nature of a game?

"Oh it would've been, could've been worse than you would ever know
The dashboard melted but we still have the radio
We talked about nothing which is more than I wanted you to know"

Modest Mouse - Dashboard



Back in 2014 I complained about The Secret World trying to pass off 1980s style text adventures as official updates to a product released in the 2010s. Funcom pulled this text content fake-out on their customers repeatedly, with a Halloween event, with the "bestiary" achievement timesink they tacked on to their game when it started circling the drain, and with the Sidestories text adventures. I was reminded of this recently while polishing off my old playthrough of Dead State, trying to get a better victory condition than riding of into the sunset with the local sociopath and finishing the flavor text while I'm at it. It provided another reminder that my thinking diverges quite a bit form the norm. To hell with the norm.

Anyhoo, most of Dead State's flavor text comes in the form of "data items" you can bring back to your base while adventuring: e-mails and text messages from hard drives of home computers, phones, tablets, etc. To read them you have to guess their passwords in a scrabble or fill-in-the-blanks minigame. It's entertaining enough, even if I am uncommonly terrible at it. I ended up cheating my way through almost a quarter of the list.

For instance:
_ e l e _ _ _ _ o n


My first and best guess? "Belerophon" - yes, I know it's probably supposed to have a double L but I've seen it with just the one often enough not to quible.
Actual pasword?
"Television"
Though I cringe at the prosaic tedium, I must concede it's a much more likely fit for some braindead churchgoing Texan soccer-mom's laptop. Just as I've never been able to play text adventures for never matching the right synonym to some '80s code-monkey's vocabulary, I'd probably be utter shit at trying to break into anyone's e-mail. Hopefully that also works vicey-versey.

But that leaves the question: what exactly is the role of text in games these days? At ye dawn of history (video game history, that is) the PongInvadersPacFrogger titles which shaped public perception of video games for generations were so heavily abstracted as to neither require nor benefit from much expository background. Still, interactive fiction seems to have made quite a good show of coexisting with the constantly improving video portion of video games, if Infocom's vast repertoire is any indication. Even later, more graphical games provided instructions through text... though it must be said, their largely expository loquaciousness wasn't exactly making waves in literary circles.

Ummm, yes, thanks... dad... daddy... daddy-o... whom I'm apparently meeting for the first time in my life in a very abrupt and awkward manner.

Out-of-character gameplay instructions and item descriptions have to this day remained the only sort of text reliably found across all genres. FPS more or less runs on the assumption "who needs a plot" and strategy games rank little better in that respect. The more narrative-driven sorts like Adventure or RPGs might hire writers to churn out mountains' worth of exposition but rarely, if ever, integrate that mountain into their virtual landscape. Which is a pity, because for all I've bitched about it TSW's original release deserved its reputation as one of the best-written games in any genre, with a heavy dash of linguistic puzzle-solving. It can work wonders.

Dead State's data items skillfully evoke sympathy, admiration, disgust or dismay at seeing the apocalypse unfold through the eyes of every t0m d1ck and h4rry. Most of that flavor text is of higher quality than your NPC companions' actual dialogue. So why did Dead State segregate its best written portions into a minigame making you read 150 messages staring at an old-timey green-on-black wall of text while listening to the same music track? Why did it only integrate language skills in the form of playing password Scrabble, and then only to access more text?

Seems game developers are only capable of seeing writing in one of two ways:

1) As an industry standard.
You can't have an RPG without dire rats (and the killing of ten thereof) or an FPS without a stupidly overpowered sniper rifle or an RTS without space marines.
By the same token, every other game company has this thing called "writing" so you need one too. You don't know what it's for and you wouldn't recognize it if it bit you square in the Wernicke, but by gum, you're not gonna be out-done by them city slickers back east! So you hire your teenage niece the Harry Potter slashfic prodigy whose parents keep begging you to get her out of their hair for the summer. Problem freakin' solved.

2) As a last resort.
You wasted your three million dollar Kickstarter spit-shining your polygons to justify your Nvidia logo. That's alright. Not a problem. Cheap filler's why universities invented Lit. departments. So you penny-pinch yourself a box set of idealistic young wordsmiths and proceed to corrode their cortices by demanding they somehow lend respectability to every half-assed, tired old cliche you dream up in your worst "wouldn't it be cool if" moments.
Write me a ten page description about space marines sniping dire rats. But y'know, make it sound fresh and cutting edge!
They're not for-realsies "game designers" like yourself of course, so no need to really listen to their input. They merely exist to pad out everything you can't handle through your game engine. Can't animate faces? Describe the NPCs' emotions. No time to illustrate the hero's travels with an actual game map? Drum up a travelogue. Can't think of any practical means to jazz up your +1 swords? Cue the "forged by Klingon mithrilsmiths" tooltips. Your entire premise is completely nonsensical? Make the writers make the nonsense make sense.
Writers: game industry duct tape.

Plenty of arguments can be made for what does or does not constitute good plot or characterization in a medium defined largely by pointing and clicking, but the real task at hand should be implementing game text in a game context. Lore books are fine in themselves but it's hard to think they're all that's left of several thousand years' worth of written communication adapted to electronics. So, flavoring aside, how might game writing be made more meaningful, more interactive?

What about reading comprehension? Does anyone remember how to follow directions anymore?

Replace those idiotic Skyrim HUD markers for every quest with written instructions, Morrowind style. Stop auto-updating quests stage by stage and make the player follow the sequence of events described in some dead explorer's journal or some superspy's twitter feed. This can encompass both straightforward directions and obtuse hints. When they have entire 3D-modellable virtual worlds at their disposal, it's amazing that game designers don't create more Gold-Buggy hunts for buried treasure, poetically hinting at various in-game locations or persons. But of course for verbal descriptions to reliably lead anywhere, the rest of your team must be capable of fleshing out a world with recognizable details: architecture, personalities, etc.

The Secret World once again made a good show of it in a few missions like The Kingsmouth Code but it's very hit or miss. Used to be a lot more frequent a device, and frequently cheesy. That old Dune game had you search for smugglers "in the fish's mouth" - jinkies, gang, this sure is a tough mystery!

When something requires secretive hints to discover, it probably shouldn't literally be visible from space.

The good news is that home computers might just have advanced a bit since 1992. The bad news is that game developers' mentalities haven't. Any modern first-person game can easily provide the visual detail you need to find the man with a tulip in his lapel at a party or the one building in town with Doric columns, including red herrings like daisies and Corinthian columns. Top-down strategy or roleplaying titles aren't far behind. The use of verbal descriptions should have increased as graphics got more illustrative, not decreased in favor of map markers.

Then there's the thorny issue of riddles.

Players good or bad at solving them can wind up hating computer game riddles, largely due to the very, very very limited repertoire to which game companies confine themselves. You've got the one whose answer is always "time" then the "four legs, two legs, three legs" one, and let's not forget the "one guard tells the truth, the other one lies" routine. Even Aesop must've thought that one was played out.

For one thing, riddles and puzzles have always been disruptive. You're on an epic swashbuckling adventure or a grand military campaign, then suddenly someone steals your pants. Or there's a riddle imp for no particular reason. Or the most secure facility in the multiverse is passworded by one of Gollum's noodle-scratchers.
Show, don't tell.
Instead of telling me the riddle about the three doors with three hazards, put three doors in your damn game and make me choose between tigers and fire and poison gas based on scraps of verbal information dropped in my path. Don't just stall the player for the purpose of riddling:

-and yes, they pulled that lazy crap in 2014 or something.

Incorporate riddles into the actual gameplay. Also, try basing riddles on the world you're building. Again, the wealth of objects and details available in a modern game should allow for at least some in-jokes and self-reference. Drop some hints along a strategy campaign as to the enemy's security procedures and have the player try to figure out which tank in an armor column holds the enemy leader. Write sonnets on the alchemical composition of dragon scales to give the player hints as to the best magic energy to fling at them.

Write a story about the evil wizard losing hearing in his left ear so the player knows to position his party's spellcaster to the wizard's left during the fight to avoid counterspells. Give me a history of the kingdom to read (including its famous weapons) only to later drop me into the royal museum, able to swipe only one item. Drop hints as to which word the enemy secret agent was hypnotically made vulnerable to and have me try to text-to-speech it into a loudspeaker while that enemy agent is hacking the door to my office.

Ah, we're back where we started, with typing. Text as user input rarely works: cumbersome at best and as shown above, even ten letters almost guarantee writer / reader divergence. So stop trying to be precise about it. There are plenty of chat bots out there capable of (badly) simulating a conversation by recognizing a few code words and returning generic replies. Why not incorporate chat bots into games, having them respond from a small pool of semi-randomized in-game actions to vague combinations of words from the player? Think of them as slightly retarded dobermans. Or have the player learn words in an alien or demonic language and try to form phrases with the on-screen symbols for those words in order to communicate with allies or cast spells. Give me an alienese keyboard.

Stop fencing the written portion of your games off into minigames, tooltips and lore books. Reading should feature right up there with listening for audio cues or watching for motion in the underbrush.