About Will Smith on Games' Writing

Something to point out about games is that they don't cover a lot of genres like film and literature do. Games like Walking Dead and Heavy Rain are examples that games can branch out into the dramatics and with drama I feel writers can showcase their skill. Most games will be action type games with action dialogue and now compare any action film to lets say Mass Effect or GTA and I feel most people wont really see the difference. The only draw back to games that really sets it back is the visuals, there not photo realistic or at any level to actually produce animations believable enough to actually feel emotional towards the stories.

There are films with the simplest story but the actor/actress really sell it and make the best out of it. Like look at Little Miss Sunshine a ok movie with a simple premise but the actors really made the film enjoyable and funny. If games can get better voice work with better animations up to par with the top PC tech I feel games will surly be sitting next to movies.

Again with better animations and voice work everything would become better. I don't really think the writing in games are plain laughable, that would just be nit picking which I could do with anything.

Also I hate when people bring up literature as if movies are anywhere near as good as literature. Never will a movie or game ever tell a story as good as a book and thats that.

Also games like many of you know and pointed out games are very young.

I'd be curious to know how you guys would specifically define "good writing" or "bad writing". Didn't read through every post but it seems like everyone's qualifying writing as "great", "laughable", etc., without a consensus on what those qualifiers mean, or maybe even what "writing" means, since I see some people focusing on dialogue and some on story.

I think the particular appeal of something like The Walking Dead is how well it adapts the pacing and storytelling of TV/movies into an interactive form. And so the writing there is understood as "better" because it's more familiar, and not necessarily because of literary merit. (And I actually do think Walking Dead is exceptionally well written, but it's also traditional and "safe"/commercial writing.)

It's retarded to compare it with books because books don't have dialogue, they have lines of dialogue, no sound/expression/speed involved.

It's naive to even compare it to movie since video games don't have the "expression" part down ether, animating character movement during dialogue is hard unless that is the only thing your games has to throw money at... paying animators is expensive and you need good ones to mimic real life dialogue( see : The walking dead )

And video games now vs video games 5 years ago, well, id say the dialogue has indeed improved.

@Xtrememuffinman: That was the most "Written for a trailer" line I think I've ever heard.

Saying "the writing in video games is bad" is one of the least constructive criticisms on the planet at this point. I don't disagree that most of it is; but 90% of the time, the people making that complaint just say "it's bad" and leave it at that.

In what way is it bad? How bad is it, compared to other bad things? How about some particularly bad examples, so we can see what you're talking about?

...Do you know what you're talking about?

Merely saying "the writing is bad" in relation to video games is getting to be as trite and easy as comedians making jokes about airline food.

There's no reason that big budget game writing should be any worse than TV writing, and it often isn't. We're trying to compare video games to the high bars of TV shows, the Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men? And we still can't say with any certainty that the very best video games (the walking dead/ME3) are consistently worse. How about "How I met your mother" or "Fringe" or other Network stuff that's written on the cheap? I don't think video game writing is any worse than that. I don't think video game acting is any worse either, though you often get the impression that dialogue has been recorded piecemeal, so actors dont' get emphasis on the right word, lacking the necessary context. The only thing that's uniformly worse is the nonverbal elements of delivery, which are very important and probably very difficult to capture, also.

I think that calling dialog in games, especially Mass Effect, which he specifically calls out, "frequently laughable" is an overstatement. Is it perfect? No. There are certainly moments where there are stupid lines, but the Mass Effect trilogy is essentially 100 hours long at this point, and I don't think there's anything out there that can create 100 hours of content without some of it being kind of bad.

And, as much as I adore The Walking Dead, I don't think its dialog, overall, is any better or worse than Mass Effect's.

In the case of Mass Effect I would definitely agree. Acting like Mass Effect is the industries best example of writing is just a fallacy, so we should quit trying to turn that series into something it's not. It's a cool world, with cool characters, but the ideas are what people are drawn to, the writing's never been spectacular, and I think they'd have to change a lot of things about the structure of their entire game in order to fix that.

Also anyone who thinks video games have a worse track record than other mediums should turn their tv to a random channel, pick a random movie on Netflix, or go to the comic book store, and then try to tell me that's the case. Even if we take the absolute best that movies have to offer, comparing their writing to games is like apples to oranges. The things the writing is trying to accomplish are different in different mediums. When using dialogue in games you're not just trying to have an entertaining exchange between two characters (and when this is all the writer is trying to accomplish this is usually an example of bad video game writing, because they are not playing to the medium's strengths), an example of good video game writing involves so much more, like making the player feel like they have agency in the narrative, or feeding the player information about actually playing the game or interacting with the world. Maybe this looks like worse writing when looking at it from the outside, but games aren't meant to be looked at, they are meant to be played. It's this inherent difference between video games and other mediums that makes comparisons like these so asinine. We're stifling the evolution of video games by saying that movies are better, because they aren't even trying to do the same thing, so drawing comparisons can only lead to games trying to fix problems that don't exist, and side track them down a path that the medium shouldn't even be trying to follow.

So yeah if you take the context of actually playing the game out of Mass Effect and compare it to the best examples of other mediums, sure the writing looks pretty shitty. But what the fuck is the point of making this comparison?

He reads an awful lot - much of is sci-fi. In comparison even decent game plotting and dialog is poor.

It is hard to get right, even when they employ decent writers it tends to fall flat. A favourite author of mine wrote Crysis 2 and the plot in that game is terrible.

Trying to compare the dialogue and writing in a game to a novel is laughable. Video games are just miles off. It's a shame.

@Gladiator_Games: Yeah, I heard it was bad. Not seen it. Amazing as he has written space marines in prose and can turn his hand to comics - I guess screenwriter really is a completely different skill set.

I wouldn't say "laughable." Mostly unremarkable and as someone said upthread, "flat." TWD was very well done indeed and stands up with any well written TV show, and has better writing than the TWD series - you could say far better even with the program's strong showing this year.

Just got KOTOR2 off Steam and the writing is very good, even among the minor characters you meet and the numerous dialogue choices available. Say what you will about Obsidian but they are more than competent writers/storytellers.

I don't know, even TWD had some pretty laughable and highly unnecessary exposition coming out of characters' mouths, especially when considering it was exposition for stuff that I had just played in the previous episode. That stuff really stuck out.

Well yeah, like many of us Will Smith reads books. For those who don't read much and play a lot of video games, I think a good book would blow their minds or something.

@Brendan said:

Well yeah, like many of us Will Smith reads books. For those who don't read much and play a lot of video games, I think a good book would blow their minds or something.

I dont need your fancy word papers.

A lot of the writing on TV shows is just as laughable, but in a different way. Christ, have you ever watched a show like Two And a Half Men? Or any of the CSIs? Or a soap opera?

Or almost any action movie (which is what a lot of games essentially are interactive forms of)?

Sure a lot of games have shit writing, but what is that saying about how 90% of everything that has ever been made is crap?

The original Star Wars trilogy is considered a cinematic classic, but there's a ton of dialogue in those films that makes most of Mass Effect look like Shakespeare, let alone the NEW Star Wars trilogy! It's just a perception thing.

@laserbolts said:

@Brendan said:

Well yeah, like many of us Will Smith reads books. For those who don't read much and play a lot of video games, I think a good book would blow their minds or something.

I dont need your fancy word papers.

Anythin' my TV won't say at me, ain't worth knowin'.

@Fallen189 said:

Trying to compare the dialogue and writing in a game to a novel is laughable. Video games are just miles off. It's a shame.

I don't think everybody who gives an opinion about writing separates the writing from the presentation. Novels, to me, get away with a lot of terrible writing. When you read something, you are going to imagine it how you want it to be, so even the worst line will be presented to your mind in the best way possible. There is no tone, no inflection, no pacing, no timing, absolutely no aspect of delivery of dialog. You will always read it in the way you find most believable to you.

The modern video game industry is the hardest medium in which to establish believability. A book allows you to imagine a scene that is dictated to you how you want, and you tend to find your own imagination very believable. A movie is much harder than that because it has to actually show you how things look and sound, but it is still dictating its writing to you, which lends to believability. A modern video game has to paint the picture far more vividly and broadly than a movie, but also, by the nature of the medium, must allow you to poke and prod at it, testing its reality. A movie shows you only what it wants to show you and leaves the rest to your imagination, just like books. Books are a window into a world that you can't see, and movies are a window into a world you can only see a very specific part of.

Video games (to make a pun) shatter the window metaphor. Video games put you in their world and allow you to ask, "Why this? Why that? How about this?" And that player agency exists far beyond words. A movie can let you hear a battle and you believe it. Or it will show you a series of images from a fixed and limited perspective and you believe it. But in video games the battle isn't real unless you are shown it, and if you are shown it you can examine it as long as you like with whatever tools are at your disposal to manipulate your viewpoint. Even the most movie-esque game gives you infinitely more power to examine the reality of what is being presented to you compared to a movie. People thought BioShock had good writing probably moreso because of BioShock's art direction than its actual writing. BioShock is hallmark video game writing; you can pick out almost every bad video game writing trope in BioShock. But that game built its world in a remarkably believable way, which in turn makes the dialog believable.

But not only is video game writing more in danger of being negated by presentation than in other medium of storytelling, but that very same fact makes it harder to write. BioWare games would be less believable if your companions only spoke and revealed information at dramatically convenient times, like books and movies do. So to establish necessary believability, you have to be able to converse with the characters. But it still wouldn't be believable if they didn't say what you expect them to say, which puts a greater burden on the writers. A movie script can contrive circumstances and rely on a thousand different tricks to hide information from you, cause you to assume information, deliver information to you in the best and most dramatic way, etc. But a video game won't be believable (and thus the writing won't mean anything) unless it allows you to test the reality of characters in setting in a way absolutely no other medium does.

People who talk about books being vastly superior to games don't keep these facts in mind and are clearly readers, not writers.

@Branthog said:

Even at its best, writing and dialogue in games tend to have to be prefaced with "... for a video game". As gamers, we are so starved for quality writing and dialogue that we will take the smallest piece of kibble and regard it as an enormous feast. We'll blow things out of proportion and treat something that is merely passable (if that) in any other medium as if it is the most exceptional piece of work, ever. Not because it is -- but because everything surrounding it is of such poor quality.

There are a couple of exceptions, but they're truly rare.

I used to get shit for this opinion, but in the past few months, I've finally heard other people (mostly game journalists and a few developers) actually state it. Perhaps the tide is turning and gamers no longer feel they have to be so defensive about their recreation and we can start to admit that we have a long fucking way to go.

I disagree with this entirely. It's easy for people to have negative opinions and insist anything else is the result of bias, but I will tell you that I tend to watch very few movies and read very few books on a yearly basis because I have trouble finding quality writing, and one reason I like video games is because there is interesting and good writing going on in the medium.

You simply refuse to look at proportions. You think video games are awash with bad writing not because it is more proportionately low quality than other media, but because the video game industry isn't big enough. One day we will have that enormous feast not because proportionately video game writing got better, but because the video game industry grew so much that playing all of the games with good writing that came out in a given year would take up most of your year.

Everything surrounding good movies is of equal or lesser quality than the worst video games. The difference is you don't see those because you aren't picking up shitty movies because you've run out of good movies to watch.

I actually think the dialogue as written is generally _okay_, not great but not outwardly bad. The problem with most game dialogue is its need to explain things several times over, and the lack of conversationality. Characters in video games don't speak to each other, they speak at each other. The digital actors rarely have the animation to truly convey what they're saying, and the line-cut-line-cut-line-cut nature of how dialogue in games works gives it a real air of sterility.

He's completely wrong about the Walking Dead. It does not have 'good' dialogue, it's no more intelligent or clever than anything in Gears of War (funnier, though). It's largely people swearing and cursing about how bad something is, and then emoting sadly how hopeless it is. What Walking Dead does nail is conversationality. Characters talk over each other, interrupt each other, when they speak they match each other's tone, as if the respondent can hear the original actor. It's a success of what theater types call naturalism, as opposed to most other games which feel more staged by nature of how they dole out animation and voice acting into their robot actors.

But fuck him if he thinks there's anything on mainstream television or film that competes with the intelligence of Obsidian.

The man has opinion. Go figure, right?

For the most part I have to agree with him.

@Scotto said:

A lot of the writing on TV shows is just as laughable, but in a different way. Christ, have you ever watched a show like Two And a Half Men? Or any of the CSIs? Or a soap opera?

Or almost any action movie (which is what a lot of games essentially are interactive forms of)?

Sure a lot of games have shit writing, but what is that saying about how 90% of everything that has ever been made is crap?

The original Star Wars trilogy is considered a cinematic classic, but there's a ton of dialogue in those films that makes most of Mass Effect look like Shakespeare, let alone the NEW Star Wars trilogy! It's just a perception thing.

I am with you. CSI in particular is fucking TERRIBLE. Not even the writers' fault, either, those procedurals are just so cheap and so shallowly plotted that at many points they just need to put plot beats in dialogue form because they don't have the time or budget to shoot them. My personal pet peeve are the extremely dumb procedural moments when characters finish each other's sentences, which tend to go like this:

"Technobabble, scienc-y stuff, babble, babble, so..."

"So you're saying that Evil McBaddypants stole the Macguffinator?!"

"Exactly"

Or how about when some crucial piece of information from some witness has never been divulged, at times for decades, until the main character decides to, you know, ask politely?

As to your Star Wars point, wasn't there a rumour about Alec Guinness being utterly ashamed of a bunch of the lines he had in A New Hope? Specifically, I remember something about the "disturbance in the force" line being ridiculous in writing. I bet some higher level SW geeks can help me out on this one.

Frankly, SOME game dialogue is atrocious too, of course. Particularly translations from Japanese and that kind of stuff. And often games don't have the advantage of being able to stop and focus on a dialogue moment just for the sake of acting or writing because dialogue is rarely interactive, and interactive dialogue rarely showcases strong acting or pacing because... well, it's interactive. That means that so-so TV can balance out the average with some standout stuff but games are stuck with very functional dialogue writing for the most part. Doesn't mean all or even most of the dialogue you get in good story-driven games is crap. Sure, we have our CSIs, but we also have The Walking Dead and Portal 2, right? Hell, Portal 2 isn't even close to the worst dialogue uttered by Stephen Merchant, and the guys is funny as hell almost all the time.

Has Will Smith watched some of his own movies? I've seen direct to video titles with better writing.

@Christoffer said:

My problem with dialog in some/most video games is that it often don't sound like anything real people would say. Every sentence comes out as a carefully prepared punchline derived (sometimes poorly) from high concept TV or movies. It's wooden and boring, and sometimes laughable.

Difference in medium, they don't all scale equally. Besides, it's not like film gets it right either in terms of "anything real people would say."

@2:54

@stryker1121 said:

I wouldn't say "laughable." Mostly unremarkable and as someone said upthread, "flat." TWD was very well done indeed and stands up with any well written TV show, and has better writing than the TWD series - you could say far better even with the program's strong showing this year.

I liked The Walking Dead, and I think it's as good as the show and comic at their best (and that it doesn't hit some of the lows that the show and comic do), but to say it stands up with any well-written TV show is ridiculous. Put TWD up against Louie or Mad Men and it looks like a huge pile of garbage.

I think games need to realize that they aren't a narrative medium like other narrative mediums. The Walking Dead has a pretty good story as game stories go, but it really makes me think of what the purpose and formulation of story in games can be. For instance, what about XCOM? The overarching plot of that game doesn't have a lot of twists and turns, but the research descriptions are terrific and some of the incidental dialogue your department heads deliver is really great. And more importantly, that game serves as a story generation device. All the choices popping off all the time make it much more personally meaningful than anything else I played this year.

I agree with OP, its not any more laughable than movie and series dialogue.

@bvilleneuve said:

Louie

I love Louie. Nothing quite like a show that can make you laugh so hard you need to stop or you will feel actual pain and then make you bawl like a baby in the same episode.

The problem with writing in video games isn't vague notions like "that was a good or bad line!", but a complete lack of depth. Most video games are about saving something (the world, your girlfriend, etc.) and nothing beyond that. Sure, you'll find nuggets of obligatory human drama in there, but you don't often feel that's where the author's heart lies.