Less Talk More Rock

I finally understand why I can't stand Dragon Age.

> The illustrations don't really complement the text, and interrupt text flow.

Especially annoying was that the images were presented before they were mentioned in the text. The reader is interrupted from reading text to see this large image that has nothing to do with the preceding text.

The giant "1, 2, 3" is an attempt to add Rock amongst a slew of talk.

He's making two separate points.

1) Video game developers should just go ahead and make games instead of going through a lengthy planning process.

I agree with this in the context of indie games, and I guess in the context of most games pre-1990 or so. I can't see this working with modern big-name games. (Some day it will, but at that point the modern big-name games will have moved on.)

2) Video games should have less text and go with other ways of conveying stuff.

This would be better written as "games which don't use much text can be lots of fun". I don't think a stronger thesis can easily be supported.

Zelda games since Link to the Past have used more text than the original, but they've also told stories that wouldn't have been possible without it.

Metroid Prime doesn't have much text unless you go around scanning things. But that's also where the plot comes from. The world is atmospheric by itself, but atmosphere doesn't tell us how the world came to be like it is.

I would love to see a story and characters as intricate as (say) Final Fantasy VI conveyed without much text, but I just don't see it happening.

There are games which can be communicated well without using text and there are those which can't. The author seems to be saying that the latter category either don't exist or are somehow less pure. I think a more reasonable argument would be that the former category deserves more exploration.

What immediately comes to mind when I read this is the original Half-Life, and how it has a complete narrative, told mostly through the environment. There's no pre-mission briefing or cut-scenes, and very little dialogue. You simply experience the word, and that world makes sense. It barely even tells a story; it's more like you see the story that the world came from.

Portal, despite having more words and more dialogue, still comes from a very similar vein of narrative. The dialogue doesn't tell you the story, it gets you acquainted with the (complex) character of Glados. The story is still told by experiencing the environment, and realizing the world that environment is a part of. The bulk of the story is implied between the lines.

Yahtzee recently railed against the whole audio-log gimmick[1] you often see nowadays as ways of advancing the narrative. I think it overlaps a lot with this essay. I don't mind a story being told explicitly, but (some?) games don't need such explicit methods to tell their stories. As an aside, I feel that Bioshock, despite having audio logs, is a true successor to Half Life in using the environment to tell a story and set a scene, because its environment is so detailed and an integral part of the story its telling. 90% of the audio logs could be removed and the story would stand on its own. Nonetheless, the audio logs added to the game by providing characters that could not easily fit into the game environment during gameplay, and those characters helped characterize the world the game was set in.

I don't feel that words are inherently wrong in a video game. However, I do think that relying on overly verbose methods of storytelling isn't taking the fullest advantage of video games' unique qualities as a medium. It's like a design smell: it's not inherently wrong and there are good reasons for doing so on occassion, it just means you should step back and take a critical eye of whether you really need it or if you're better off not doing including that content, or doing it in another way.

[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-...