This is a pretty self indulgent rant for nerds so I am putting the bulk of it after the jump, but the short version is that games have shit writing, but continue to put increasing amounts of it in anyway.
Recently, I've been playing the extraordinarily Japanese game Persona 4 and been annoyed by the writing. Normally you expect paper thin plot, cliched characters, and terrible dialogue in games. But Persona is different because both it and its predecessor are maddeningly close to being legitimately well written. Don't get me wrong, it's not, despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews (92/100 on Metacritic, 9.3 from users), but it at least tries. It attempts to have relatable characters, a more restrained plot: a murder mystery set in modern Japan rather than dudes swinging giant swords and melodrama, and even attempts to have actual themes. Ultimately it fails, with a textbook 'one twist too many' resolution to the plot, only about half the characters are truly three dimensional, and the theme is glossed over for large chunks of the game and muddled towards the end. Then I started wondering if this was so flawed, what game had better writing? I came up totally blank, because writing in games is fucking horrible.
But at least it tries, and that's more than you can say for most games, right? Unfortunately, it's not even the case that terrible writing can be forgiven by being an oversight or irrelevent any more. The latest Mario game has a painfully long, unneccessary introduction that boils down to 'The Princess is In Another Castle". And then there's the absolute walls of text you get from the last few Zelda games. Grand Theft Auto IV cost over 100 million dollars to make and has countless lines of ingame dialogue and hours of cutscenes, including like the Persona games, plot-irrelevant socialization scenes meant to endear the characters to the player.
But it all is written worse than a Dan Brown novel. At it's best it might approach one of Stephen King's more forgettable books. It certainly shares the longwindedness. But it certainly doesn't compare to even a good TV show. There are no Sopranos, no Mad Men, not even a Battlestar Galactica in games.
Why? As far as I can tell, game developers do not believe that you need writers to write. The creators of the $100 million GTA, which thought that a good game required flying to Jamaica to convince musicians to rerecord their songs with references to the fictional city didn't bother to hire actual writers. It was written by game designer and VP of Rockstar Games Dan Houser and someone named Rupert Humphries who's not listed as ever writing anything else in IMDB or Wikipedia. Is it a union issue, a dispute with the Writer's Guild?
Here is a note to game designers:
YOU ARE NOT A WRITER
FUCK YOU THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE GOOD AT
Lots of games don't need professional quality writing. But if your game doesn't need good writing, it probably doesn't need very much at all. Sometimes, it's ok to just say 'The Princess is in another castle" with no explanation. You don't need a fifteen minute unskippable cutscene to try and rationalize how Sonic suddenly turned into a werewolf (my brothers got the new Sonic game for Christmas). "We thought it would be cool" is fine.
...Holy shit this is a lot of words about video games. I kind of hate myself now.
