This place is hell. A vast labyrinth of strange near asymmetrical buildings and outlandish perspective and physics bending architectural anomalies. Places that twist the logic between interior and exterior space. Children wander through the town with their own strange customs and gangs. The Adults are trapped in their own world of superstition, politics, and bizarre pseudo-physical class distinction. A thick blanket of yellow brown smog covers the dingy cattle town making everything brown and dying. Unseen dogs bark and howl madly in the distance. Overhead, a tiny patch of sky shows a distant sky of blue and clouds. This is Ancient Step.

I am the player. I am playing Pathologic. I insert myself into this horrid place as a number of characters. I am, at best, a casual participant or pawn in the events that will unfold before me. I start as the scientist who wishes to conquer death. I have come here to see and immortal man.

I wake in a dingy little bed and breakfast. All the mirrors in the town are broken for some inexplicable reason. I leave. In the backyard is a transient and some bizarre fetal creature, they are the half formed men, the cattle herders of the swamplands. They are the wurm. By the buildings gates is a creature in a medieval plague suit and a faceless wraith like creature. They tell me to behave like myself and be mindful of my condition, for I am bound by the rules of reality here. I can hunger, I can weaken myself through fatigue and illness. I listen carefully and leave.

The immortal man is dead. Found murdered in his hidden antechamber between the folds of space and time. Worse, my friend and mentor is dead, found with a giant spike as long as your arm rammed straight through his chest. Some suspect his son, the crazy surgeon. Others suspect a mad half man cow slaughterer. I am deeply confused.

Worse yet, something terrible is coming. Disease. Death, my enemy, creeps ever closer. Every day, people die, places become quarantined, fights break out, and food and resources become excessively scarce. Horror and violence breaks out amongst the people as they fight to survive. I find a weapon and have to sell it for medicine and food. But only the children with toy dog heads have the proper medicine. I have no money and nothing to barter with these mad kids. I am desperate, I am dying. I have no choice; I find a group of them and slaughter them, one by one, with a bullet to the head. I finish off my indiscretion by raiding their corpses and stealing what I need. What have I done?

Soon the world becomes infected. The walls welt and sores open on the buildings. They fester with this strange disease from beyond the concept of conventional understanding. The bodies pile higher and the people grow increasingly mad. The government comes in to quash the infection only to fall to this strange metaphysical illness. People die and I am incapable of doing anything outside of making things seemingly worse.

A million years ago and a face later, I am the surgeon, a healer of men and savior of life. I am also a serial killer. I know I can survive coming illness. I can make medicine but only the swamp dwelling wurm have the sufficient materials. To make my deal with them, I need to sow the land with flesh and blood. I murder people and bury their kidneys in the ground. I get my medicine and live a little longer. The ditches fill with my corpses of my sacrifices. It’s good to be alive.


It all suddenly becomes clear to me. I am responsible for this. If there one thing that is clear, none of this would have happened if I had not pressed the new game button. I speak not of myself in terms of my masks, the characters I can choose to play. I speak of myself, the man before the computer. The disease and horror I unleash is a result of entering this world. If I chose nothing, to not play this game at all this place, this town would still be here trapped in its own little digital universe. I am the outsider, who brings a disease to a new world. I am a bringer of death.

Such are the consequences of my actions. They span not only across this game, but all games. The fact of my mere presence brings suffering to bear for all the simple digital beings within the code. It is like a dark atom, trapped in a constant quantum flux between two states, ever changing. The simple act of observation upon this place of quantum flux causes the condition of the observed ‘universe’ to change. The quantum state chooses one aspect and for some strange reason, it always destruction. I wish I control this universe’s quantum state change but I can not seemingly jump timelines where everything is okay for the town of Ancient Step, the world of Oblivion or the wastes of Chernobyl. But this is simple quantum physics on a macro level, a basic law if you will. The act of observing something will always change the conditions of what you are observing.

I am the player. I am not a passive observer or pawn of the events that unfold before me. I am the instigator, the chaos bringer wrapped in many faces and personas as I travel between distant worlds and stories. I bring famine, war, disease and death upon a people innocent of the Armageddon I unleash upon them. I am the horsemen of the apocalypse. I am a dark god who sows the seeds of misery and destruction in the myriad of worlds I choose to play with.

I am the player of games and I wish to be entertained. Now, who do I play with next?

In all forms of entertainment, the aspect of selling commercial art is generally considered a part of the entertainment business. This business as people understand it, has been closing studios, merging properties, removing dedicated servers and providing trouble for people for a very long time now. Yet people fail to really understand how abstract the business and all forms of business really are.

See, when a company is a publicly traded commodity, its possession is broken into equal sized fragments often referred to as shares. An abstract reference to a collective of shares is commonly known as stock. As a company gains or loses money in its ventures, the confidence of said company wanes and waxes in the view of the public. This confidence filters into ‘perceived’ value of shares, which then quickly becomes the actual value of said stock. This is the lifeblood of sustaining companies. The quick transference from economic confidence to perceived value to actual value is not actually guided by any form of real logic or economic reasoning. It has been proven scientifically that the flakey, nonsensical and overreacting behavior of the stock market has connecting with such things as mass hysteria and herd mentality (with a little pheromones throne into the mix).

The economic confidence of a company, as mentioned above, is governed by earnings. Every year, executives and the CEO make an economic forecast for the coming year. This forecast predicts how much money the company expects to make by the end of the fiscal year. Such predictions are considered reasonable and in line with the earnings of previous years. However, if less than the predicted amount of money is made during the year, then it is considered a ‘loss’ by the executives, CEO, and shareholders (ie STUPID). They then cut down the production end by canceling projects, laying off workers and closing studios to reduce the money sink and increase gain.

This is seemingly counter to the fact that said ‘loss’ is not a loss at all, as such money did not exist before the prediction was made. For example, If a company predicted 100 million dollar gain and only made 95 million, then it is considered to have lost 5 million and the company has to let things and people go to make up for it.

Such as the case of the industry. But the illogic goes even farther than that. See, an entertainment company is broken into two parts, the creative section which makes the games, and the management section which contains all the producers, managers, executives and Chairmen. This latter section of a company takes most of the revenue produced by the larger corporation when they actually contribute nothing to the bottom line. They are by classical definition, parasitic, as they drain energy and power from the host while returning little to no benefit.


This economic parasite is everywhere, controlling and trampling the creative department under their ‘leadship’, buzzwords and execu-speak. It is the reason why Free Radical is dead and Westwood was let go. The people in this management ‘culture’ run the industry and our artistic culture. Virtually no executive has any experience with the industry they are knee deep in. They are interchangeable upper management. They are ‘leaders’, raised by the MBA executive ‘culture’ to go out and make money in any field, despite the fact that they have experience or working knowledge of the industry they are in. They’re trolling for profit as quickly as possible, no matter the consequences (short term gain versus long term loss). They are the reason while almost all games are homogenous products. They jump on a trend that sells and jump to the next one as soon as it comes along. They are the reason why big chain bookstores have a wall dedicated to James Patterson, yet shrink the Science Fiction department by 100 books a year. They trade in nonexistent commodities (forecasts) as if they were real, which led to such things as prospects and sub prime mortgages. And we all know too well how that turned out.

And nobody manages to see the unsustainable lunacy that North American economics have created. Nobody listens and almost nobody fights back (I haven’t bought an Activision game since 2003, Doom 3 doesn’t count as it was it just published by them). But people keep buying games and feeding the leeches and nothing ever changes because people sustain what is simply an illogical, unsustainable, stupid and frankly evil system.

You bought modern warfare 2 and that’s how Bobby Kotick, the scum of the industry and indicative of everything wrong with modern commerce, made 35 million in one week period. Congratulations!

This episode deals with the inherent problem with Blogging about games and the problems within my own post.

Games are an interesting culture to speak about. Even in its simplest form, it engenders discussion and argument which websites such a Destructoid facilitates through both its intelligent community and blog feature. However, this is the internet, which engenders many problems with communication and understanding.

First off, communication. With the internet, it’s very rare that people actually know someone to a point in which they understand the intricacies of personal tone and meaning. The best example is the We Should Expect Better Articles. People look at me and say that my derogatory tone and singular accusation is too hard edged against people who work very hard at what they do. Maybe they are right. But what people commonly seem to associate with my posts is me screaming and beating my chest like a lunatic. In reality, if I were to speak with my own voice it would actually be quite depressed sounding and in a very matter of fact tone. Very rarely does any of my problems with gaming actually anger me (such exceptions being music games and social networking), but rather simply disappoints me. I feel that what I think are halfassed products getting paraded around at the expense of better titles as well as the fact that game design has been steadily going downhill since 2000 to be quite sad as a gamer.

Now about understanding. There are a lot of misconstrued opinions about my articles and I feel that I must explain myself for the sake of clarity.

The primary problem is my statements on stupidity. The word, stupidity, is merely a label I place over my feelings about developers. What I refer to as stupidity is in fact is a lack of knowledge coupled with an unwillingness to learn and a delusion that they do something well. A perfect example for this can be taken from my own family history. My father is a director of children’s cartoons. He’s directed The magic School Bus, Braceface and is currently working on one of if not the highest rated cartoon on the Disney Channel, Handy Manny. There are animators and board artist out there that he knows. They are terrible. They have awful composition, timing, they are even terrible at drawing. They work at a professional level, but lack the talent to do it even remotely well. But they think they’re the greatest thing since Walt Disney and when someone more talented calls them out and tries to help them improve, they are resistant to instruction and insulted that someone would even question their greatness. That is stupidity.

Through my family’s constant encounters with ‘stupidity’ and my own personal experiences throughout my life, I’ve come to recognize and classify human behaviour quite well. I can see when someone is being ‘stupid’ from a mile away. And if I’m incapable of succeeding anywhere else in my life, I can rest easy that I’m at least good at understanding human nature to a degree.

The next part of misunderstanding regarding my work deals with my preponderance towards zero tolerance. Well, yes, I have no tolerance towards something that can be done better quite easily. It shows a singular lack of effort and understanding of the profession you are in when you do something wrong. And my ultimate opinion is, if you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all. However, my concept of right is very different from what you may assume. I see ‘right’ as being neither perfect nor even good. Doing something right is an aspect which can be seen throughout your work. It insinuates itself into the character of the final product you turn in. Doing it right shows you have a fundamental understanding of the work that you are doing professionally. It can be boring, it can just be just not that great, But if you understand what your working on and actually understand how to implement it into a game in way that is significant and relevant to the player, then you have done it right. Look at Dead Space. Was it perfect? Far from it. But did it display a fairly competent understanding of horror, science fiction, space ship design, narrative progress and third person action adventure gameplay? Yes and it did it quite well.

Oh and for the record, when someone such as myself and others who have an admittedly limited experience with game development are able to point out blatant flaws in level, narrative and game design, there is something very wrong with the product you just released.

I also argue that games nowadays are awfully designed in comparison to products from 20-even 6 years ago. And my belief is that in this day of easy to use third party engines, normal mapping, advanced AI, real-time physics and photorealistic Graphics, if you can’t beat a game like Quake 2 (1997), Half Life (1999) or System Shock 2 (2000), what in god’s name are you doing? And what depresses me further is that none of these newer games make any effort to understand what made those games, with their limited technology, so great.

I don’t expect you to agree with me. In fact I hope you don’t as it allows discourse and debate to occur. What these articles are the accumulation of my personal opinions into a series of argumentative essays in order to raise questions about the nature of gaming. Hell I’m probably wrong concerning many aspects of my opinion, but it’s just how I feel as a gamer who’s been screwed over too many times to count. I also don’t think that I’m the smartest person on the planet, but I feel that I’m smart enough to point out something that’s simply inexcusable and voice my opinions.

EDIT - It was recently stated that I'm the 'glass half empty' type of guy. This statement is both true and false. I have no tolerance for bad ideas and stupid game design and will frequently call these games out for the stupidity they contain. But this doesn't mean I don't like or even love them. Some games are good, just despite some horrid design choices. Metal Gear Solid is one, Far Cry 2 is another. In fact the MGS series is my second favourite game series ever made. But there are some really awful design choices that someone should have taken notice of and fixed and there is no excuse for the stupidity displayed by not remedying the problem. However, I won't deny these games aren't fun to play or even great experiences. They just have serious problems that could have been fixed with a little basic reasoning applied.

This is the third of my We Should Expect Better series.

Now I want to get this out of the way immediately. There is nothing wrong with either music OR sports games. They are designed to do exactly what they do, and I perfectly respect their relatively stable design. There is also nothing wrong with playing them and liking them. The skill of rhythm and understanding the rules of football is quite impressive. There is nothing wrong with them. I even argue that some of them are quite good (rock band, etc).

What I argue is the reason for their existence. As good as these games are, I just cannot support them. Their very is existence are acts in futility and pointlessness. The problem is that while these games may give people an experience they would never have (doing a song in front of a roaring crowd can feel quite good). In fact, as good as these games are, I believe them to be the lowest forms of entertainment and dangerous too.

They aren’t real. In truth, they are sub real. They’re vicarious alternatives to something you can really do if you put the effort into it. They don’t teach you anything about real music and reward as if you did for just being able to keep in rhythm and have fast reflexes. The games show no effort in trying to teach any real fundamentals about playing a guitar, singing, drums, football, basketball. They just turn easy to learn, hard to master real world activities and substitute them for easier digital packages. This is like going to the store and buying frozen desert instead of real ice cream. It’s the nutritional equivalent to the nutritional equivalent of a real active or creative experience.


In fact, games such as Rock Band and Madden are beginning to subvert real sports and music. People don’t go out and play football or street hockey on weekends anymore if they can just do Dallas versus Cleveland in the latest Madden games. Garage Band’s have dwindled to nothingness since Guitar Hero allowed people to master Freebird with five buttons and a dongle. It’s a crime for the simple reason that its nature removes the volition to try to succeed for real, turning everyone from potential artists and athletes into armchair wannabes.

Best example I can think of comes straight from Destructoid itself. If you ever listen to podtoid, you hear Samit drone on forever about sports games to the point in which you actually want reach into the mike and strangle his gab hole shut. He knows every single aspect and nuance of these games, the rules, the teams, the plays and the strategies. And yet, for all his constant droning, I have never heard a single mention of him getting off his ass and actually going out and playing football or street hockey with some friends. What’s the point when he could he could be a virtual superstar on his PS3.


And the strange thing is, it tends to really delude people into thinking that they can really be a successful musician or play a sport well if they just tried. Yet the ease of the game and it’s instant gratification never instills a single ounce of real motivation to actually try for excellence. These games and the rise of rags to riches media (high school musical, Fame, American Idol, etc) give rise to the strange anti Barbie of the new millennium. These games and movies strut around giving vapid praise for minimal talent and effort, raising people’s self esteem when it’s not real and not deserved.

And you know what the really sad, ironic thing is. It’s now actually cheaper to buy a real guitar (admittedly a starter instrument) or football as opposed to rock band or Madden. The fact that music and rhythm games are continuously growing and edging out real music when it’s actually cheaper to learn how to play an actual instrument makes me cry and want to tear out my hair.

Oh! And it makes me lose faith in humanity too.

If you’re interested in previous iterations of we should expect better, check out my blog for more.

I’ve decided to continue from my last post with a whole series of posts talking about aspects of video games.

We as humans tend to have a love for grouping and classifying things. What can we say, we love taxonomy. We primarily classify games in very specific tiers or levels, most of which go unnamed and often unconsidered. I have listed them here in as simple a way as possible.

-Macro-Cultural Origin; Western or Eastern
-Base Cultural Origin; Europe and North America most specifically
-Micro Cultural Origin; from individual countries (Australia, Japan, Korea, England, Germany, France, The States, Canada, Poland, Russia, Ukraine etc)
-Gameplay structuring: Turn Based, Real Time
-Non-diegetic Interactivity: player either acts upon or Interacts (adventure games) with the game world
-Diegetic interactivity: How interactive the actual game world is; a gradient from none to very
-Diegetic Relevance: How important said interaction has with the player, world and the narrative.
-Narrative/Spatial constriction: From Open World to Linear.
-Realism: the gradient of which one gauges a game; from arcade to simulation
-Accessibility: a gradient of which a game is considered from casual to hardcore
-Viewpoint: First Person, Third Person, Third Person Omniscient (the sims, strategy games)
-Design Genre: RPG, Shooter, Adventure, Action, Strategy, and any hybrid possible
-Narrative Genre: Science Fiction, Military, Fantasy, Real World Fiction, Crime, etc
-Thematic Genre: Horror, Adventure, Action, Satire, etc

The list can go on forever, getting more specific and anal about little details that ultimately don’t matter. The depth of which I have gone into gives all the base points for picturing/describing a game.

For example, take a game such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It is a: Western; European game; from Ukraine; that is Real Time; in which a player acts upon a world; with limited interactivity; But said interaction has great affect upon the game world and narrative. It is a somewhat open world game; with a heavy focus on realism; and hardcore gameplay. It is a First Person; Action-Adventure-RPG-Shooter; Science Fiction Game; with a Thematic focus on Horror and Adventure.



Each aspect and influence, from the continent and country of origin to the viewpoint in which you play the game from, has an effect on how we envision the game will be. And rightly so since every cultural, national origin and design choice ultimately has a great impact on the game, how its played, how it regarded and what demographic it will appeal to.

While I argue that we should throw down our classifications and allow game design to run wild and mutate into new and various breeds of interactive entertainment; I know people are stupidly adherent to classification and tend to regard real hybrids with confusion and anger (a lot of complaints I hear about Brutal Legend confirm this).

What I instead intend to focus is what said taxonomy says about game design in general. This fill in blank, madlib sheet for games acts in very much the same manner as socio-ethnic prejudice. People, whether aware of the fact or not, have a tendency to stereotype games based on design points and generalize games from where they come from. This tends to affect the widespread appeal of games to the general gaming population who base most of their decisions and views on second and third hand opinion, personal prejudice, massive generalization, and wildly wrong assumptions. Much like how they govern their lives, in fact.

But I digress, as the inherent problem with gaming stereotypes is that for the most part, they are true. Many games that come from Japan and Korea tend to be anime influenced, turn based, fantasy rpg melodramas featuring angsty androgynous teenagers. And since what represents 60-70 percent of the eastern games that reach our western market resemble the above mentioned stereotype, it forms a solid base from which we form our opinions despite direct opposition to the fact with examples such as Dynasty Warriors, Demon’s Souls, Lost Planet, Resident Evil etc. Is it right? No. Is it excusable? No! But does it have basis in fact? Yes, yes it does.

But unfortunately, this realization within itself goes on to raise even further questions about the nature of game design itself. The fact that stereotyped games exist and are fundamentally true makes me question the validity of game design, period. This can be easily explained. Game stereotypes exist simply because they sell. People have an overwhelming preponderance towards safe investments because it’s easy to pick what you like and never take any chances.

Unfortunately, this has led to a refinement of a Lego snap-together design document that developers use today to build games that sell. It makes marketable games with minimal effort or cost and the expense of orginality. Put plot point A with introduction of Gameplay feature B. Driving segment C should lead into base assault 3A. Street Level fight G should finish with mandatory tank fight R. Finish off game with set piece 42-Alpha. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Modern Warfare 2!


While this may be attributed to the refinement of games into a high concept entertainment business, which leads to the relatively homogenized nature of game design we see now, and this is true, I argue a counterpoint. I argue that even being unoriginal, most game design is simply terrible. This is, once again, the calling card of my old friend, Stupidity.

And yes, it is stupidity. People walk around and say they are lazy or uninspired. I pose the fact that stupidity is prevalent here because game designers are trained to think this way. It’s called super-specialization. Many are trained to think and act in certain ways, using rote process instead of creativity to develop their games. They are, by process of their own education, drained of actual intelligence and creativity. The levels they make are rote and so by the book that if they weren’t visually interesting, it would literally look like you were running around a large corridor with some cover. The game features they implement are so mediocre and overused by the rest of game industry, you could strip a game of it’s textures and label and they would not be able to tell the difference between one game or another. But challenging someone trained like this causes them to virtually malfunction. They are so used to doing something a certain way that asking them to do something different will stop them dead in their tracks.

People may ask what is the inherent difference between stupidity and simple ignorance in these situations. Ignorance is the lack of knowledge but the ability to learn. There is nothing wrong with that. Stupidity is the lack of knowledge without the ability or willingness to learn coupled with the complete lack of understanding the basics of real design, which should be understood before making any effort.

The best example is stupid level design. The inherent artificiality of levels in games today is a crime. They design spaces to look real with no understanding of how reality works. Take a street level for example. A street is designed for maximum population access and use. This leads to problems in the level design such as frequent side streets and buildings. So developers miraculously solve this problem by making every side street and off shoot result in a dead end, or are blocked off by cars or police barriers. But can’t people just jump over the hood? Not if they can’t jump!!! There are also buildings that people enter and use. Oh, wait all the doors are locked. The lack of understanding of how spaces and objects work is simply astounding. Is it not possible that people can jump over barriers and cars or break glass to get access to a building?


They either don’t understand this or simply don’t care. But what really makes me cry on the inside is the absolute brain bending idiocy to not realize the potential of maximizing the use of the street. Imagine using buildings for cover or using them to get to the access point, turning a regular street level battle into a pitched fight across small businesses and roof tops. And what about side streets? Sneaking behind buildings to take out forces without being seen greatly increases the options for the gameplay and replaying. And the barriers? People can get around cars and signs quite easily in the real world, so why is it so damn hard here. What about blocking off an area with a collapsed building or even a huge vehicle like a fire truck or a train? It makes absolutely no sense and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be fixed. This literally took me, some university student from Canada, five minutes to figure out and yet it never occurred to these seasoned game design veterans?

But stupid game design is just as widespread and inane. Take for example the over use of the ‘RPG’ mechanics in shooters nowadays, using very basic stats levelling system to give ‘options’ to the player. Without significant focus on this feature, it’s merely a vestigial left over which just artificially pads the game and gives false depth to it. It’s essentially pointless. Furthermore, you don’t have to increase the complexity of a game to make it better. In many cases pure simplicity actually provides a more pure and rewarding experience. What about rechargeable health bars and the QTE in favour of gameplay or simple cutscenes? Just because every thing can be interactive, does not inherently mean it should be and what the hell is wrong with a goddamn health pack.

However the worst offender of bad game design in recent history I can think of is Far Cry 2. Don’t get me wrong, I really like that game, but for god’s sakes, some of the choices made in the design phase of the product are utterly moronic. For example, why are you randomly attacked every five minutes? Why does everyone want to kill you despite allegiances? Why do you take a taxi into the game but have to use a bus for quick travel. Why are the save spots so damn hard to see? What’s with the crappy widescreen function? Why do all your buddies get into trouble every mission? Why do enemies see you from a mile away from behind a bush? Why does stealth not work? Why is there no real ending to the game? What is with the inherent lack of SDK for PC users? None of these problem’s make any sense and could easily have fixed with a little play testing and tweaks. But they released the product as and never took the time to fix it. It makes no sense.

Why is it so hard to design game that visually and structurally makes sense. Is it so hard, and yes I do recognize the issue put forth by deadlines, to take the time and effort to research spaces and designs. Because everyone else adds some half baked gameplay mechanic to pad the length of the experience, doesn’t mean you should too. We live in an age where games are rapidly approaching photorealism (not necessarily a good thing but still) and yet we can’t expect someone who has the ability to command development tools at a professional level to make a game to give us a visual and gameplay scenario that makes sense? The original Call of Duty for PC had better level design than Modern Warfare. I’ve played mods for age old games like UT2004, Deus Ex and Half Life that show a better understanding of how spaces are constructed and how they can be used to maximise player experience than most games nowadays. And Yes I recognize great design when I see it; Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, Half Life 2 and Portal, and even Banjo-Kazooie, it is a simple fact that most games are, no matter how good I or many people may think they are, are all just terribly designed.


yes this is a mod for UT2004 called out of hell, look it up

Maybe it’s just me but when I see amateurs out pacing the professionals, there has to be something very wrong with the game’s industry.

Next up on the We Should Expect Better Series is (not necessarily in this order):

-Sound Design
-Morality
-Gamers
-Genre
-Third party Engines
-Ports
-Waggle
-Trilogies
-The business itself
And Finally: Killing the PC (this one will probably be the longest)

We live in the age of the story. Mankind, since the dawn of human civilisation, has been host to an ever evolving and changing form of make believe, the narrative. Over hundreds of thousands of years we have refined and perfected our story telling ability to what is now considered an art form. We evolve and change and adapt our art, as it is now considered to fit into different forms; written medium, mass printed medium, dramatic medium, visual medium, audiovisual medium, visual printed medium and most recently interactive medium.


However, the emergence of interactive narrative has resulted in a peculiar reversing of refining process and created a situation where the actual quality of game writing is cheapening overall.

There are always exceptions to the rule, examples where the prevalence of quality writing vastly outweighs the dreck. For example there is the decade spanning period of the golden age of adventure games, where the writing and narrative were paramount to the success of game even more than the quality of gameplay/puzzles themselves. There are the exquisite science fiction thriller narratives of the System Shock and Deus Ex franchises, the dark thematic resonance of Bioshock and Pathologic, The nostalgic Uncharted stories, Half Life 2 and related content, the underrated Pariah, the comedy of Tim Schafer and Oddworld Inhabitants, the sublime horror of Silent Hill 1-4, the quality stories put forth by developer Origin systems with games such as Bioforge, or even the primarily visual games of team ICO.

However, for the most part, game writing is often flat and uninspired with poorly plotted stories and preponderance on action and gameplay over subsequent narrative and pacing and using rote concepts or just variances on classic stories (a new game, Dark Void is very much a rocketeer fuelled play on the Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers story). Games nowadays use narrative as loose framework to build varying levels and call them coherent. In some cases, such as the incredibly fun to play Oblivion and Fallout 3, the writing is simply terrible. Even now, a growing group of games such as Call of Duty and Gears of War are typically evolving its own form of narrative play which I like to call situational writing. It involves a random set of levels created by the developers which is the forced upon the writers to arrange them in a manner that can be called coherent, and then write a story to give it general context.

Despite the growth of the situational writing model, we see a constant leaning towards the influence of mainstream blockbuster films, as the primary writing model for most games, which generates stories that tend to be as uninspired and flat as the source material often tends to be.

People tend to excuse this behaviour for poor writing as merely the product of focusing on gameplay. They say that if the gameplay is sufficiently excellent enough, the story could be simply terrible (see painkiller, Mario, and generally most games released by ID software). And while this is true of the fact that the game will be enjoyable to play, there is still no excuse for not even trying.

People look at the situation we face and call the developers and writers lazy or uninspired or even unfocused. However, I prefer a better label without the preponderance to coddling or enabling the developer to escape blame. I call them stupid.


It may sound childish and irrational, but the simple fact that all games that have bad writing tend to be a result of simple idiocy rather than laziness. Most people who generally write for games seem to have absolutely no practical knowledge of or even the conceptual will to understand the basic fundamentals of pace, plotting and dialogue and as a result decide to imitate the success of other stories (God of War to Clash of the titans, every fantasy game to Lord of the Rings or Conan etc, Halo’s marines as to Aliens’ Marines, Area 51’s Marines to Alien’s Marines, Doom’s marines to Alien’s Marines, Quake’s marines to Aliens’ Marines, Crysis’ specops to Aliens’ Marines, Chrome’s Marines to Aliens’ Marines, Killzone’s soldiers to Aliens’ marines, Gears of War’s Cogs to… Aliens’ marines, Space Marines to… oh you get the damn picture). As a result we simply get a simple variant on the same story over and over with no discourse over any form of unique plotting.

The second form of mass stupidity in the game industry is the developers themselves. They are wrapped up in the delusional belief that they are the most important part of the game. They force their ideas first and then use the writers to clean it up and make it presentable. This may also be a source for desperate overuse of Aliens’ marine idea but it stands to fact that writing is desperately necessary. If a game is written in true conjunction with development and there is exchange of ideas between writing staff and the development team, then significant increase in the quality of the plot is inevitable. It may still be rote and unoriginal but at least there is significant context to the events in the game. The writer would write the plot, the developers would take this and tell the writers what does and doesn’t work with the described levels, the writers tweak the description to fit better to a game mold, Developers make the game, changing the levels to adhere to coherency of design, writers tweak the story to fit the redesigned levels. It may not be particularly any good, but you still get a plot that is coherent to the order of levels you play.

The third and most fundamental idiocy are the publishers themselves. Executives and producers are what are best described as high paid morons. People with cookie cutter business degrees (executives) or even just over promoted secretaries (producers, don’t argue with me as I know this based on family experience) who, for the great majority of these people, have no practical knowledge of the medium they work with, attempt to make high profile artistic and entertaining products. They are so focused on maximising profits and share value they have no concern for creativity and attempt to force as much high concept into their products as possible. To force what sells above all else tends to result in three problems. Games are rushed and have incomplete stories. Games are forced to be high concept and thus be exactly like the next best selling game or intellectual property (ie copying Aliens’ marines). And Third and finally, Games are forced to shove out as many sequels as possible which stretches the ability of the already mentally handicapped writing staff even more. Despite a few exceptions to the rule, this corporate atmosphere tends to kill creativity or even the chance for good writing in any game’s industry, creating a barren creative wasteland.



To write a decent, if not original story is not difficult, it just takes time. You have to understand that there are essentially three parts to a story; a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning sets up the conflict and emotional connections for the players. The middle heightens the conflict, danger and panic and ends on a critical moment. The end uses the critical moment to drive the player towards the source of the situation and deal with it directly. The plot should have a logical flow of one event to the other utilising the basic and unastounding concept of cause and effect. Don’t randomly introduce characters objects or events that conveniently appear to solve the situation or save the day when their existence and place in the plot makes no sense. Also, it’s ok if the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Dialogue should sound exactly as how regular people should talk and emote and utilise uncommon phrases and patterns of speech to heighten the mood. Most of the time, people tend to speak candidly about something but often have a double meaning. The second meaning often is inconsequential or innocent rather than devious, secretive or malicious, but it’s still a double meaning nonetheless. Attempting to make a character edgy, dark, badass, or deliberately cool immediately results in something that just sounds stupid. Example, Nathan Drake works so well as a character because he is a likable, relatable human being, albeit in an extraordinary situation and profession. He’s cool because he is weathered and accustomed to his profession and not some icy dark anti hero like Lara Croft or forced superfly guy from the most recent Prince of Persia (the most offensively whitewashed QTE game ever made).

But for all my complaining and attempting to reason away my and hopefully many others’ dissatisfaction with terrible game narratives, I know that this will never make a difference. People unquestioningly buy what’s popular and poorly written, the morons keep making money and the cycle of submediocrity inevitably starts again. I can beat and scream and even attempt to defy them by modding and becoming a writer myself. Nobody pays for their ineptitude and nobody ever learns. People may argue with this statement but this is just how I feel about games nowadays.