The Button at the End; Or: How Not to Write a Blog Post

It’s been a while, huh? Looks like my last blog post was five years ago. I’ve changed jobs twice since then. Learned some: probably more than I realize, but certainly less than I should. But five years is long enough. It’s time to dust this place off; if not to say anything profound, then at least to get back in the swing of putting words together in something other than a P4 check-in.
To kick things off, I thought I’d pull something from my own slush pile. Blogger tells me the draft for “The Button at the End” was first written in 2012, which I’m pretty sure makes it nearly as old as some of our programmers. When I wrote this I had just come off of EVE Online, and was about to start my run on ESO. Changed jobs, genre, company, and states. The years to follow were humbling in a lot of ways.
So understand it’s strange for me to read this piece years later. I barely remember writing this. I recognize the voice, and a lot of my habits. But I also feel (or hope?) that this piece isn’t representative of what I’d write today. There’s too much certainty, the authority too much of an affectation. Some of my arguments were doubtless more complete in my head than what landed on the screen.
It’s not all bad. I was edging closer on a voice with this than some of my earlier pieces. I was leaning less-heavily on tearing down those more successful than myself than I had in entries like the short-lived “KotOR Replay” series. This is probably as close as I got in the “old” posts to be constructively critical (constructive for whom?) without being outright mean.
And I know: a fucking Mass Effect 3 ending post. I don’t really have any defense other than it was the thing to have an opinion on at the time. It and Deus Ex were fresh in my mind, and I really wanted to make something of that.
Occasionally throughout you’ll see inline comments [like this]. These are notes I just put in during a read-through. These are more spur-of-the-moment than proper critique.
So, here you go: “The Button at the End.” Take it for what it is: a video game grunt’s attempt to slam ideas about two of the industry giants together and come out with something at least interesting.
Or don’t. I’m not your boss.

The Button at the End

People care about Mass Effect. A lot. And not “care about the environment” care, or “You have a serious LEGO problem, and we’re here to help,” care. Players invested their hearts into the brands. The fans were so dedicated to the series that when the ending to the third installment underwhelmed, people burned down the internet. Rants. Op-eds (paid rants). Petitions. Threats. It was even one of the contributing factors to EA being voted the worst company of 2012, edging out Bank of America, a company whose primary products are Catch-22 fines and depression.
Eventually the fans won. Or as much as you win when the product you’re rallying against has already shipped a bajillion units. Bioware released an expanded-ending DLC. One of the Doctors issued a PR apology on their website.
Obviously players cared a deeply about the game. And it’s true that the choose-you-own-adventure buttons at the end were—design wise—a little underwhelming. But Deus Ex: Human Revolution [Should have made this a separate paragraph, give Human Revolution a proper intro.- Future Me], a game in roughly the same genre, shipped just seven months earlier and with largely the same story-button ending design. But [Do not start sentences with “but” twice in a row. –FM] Human Revolution did not destroy Eidos/Square Enix. On a whole, players loved the game. So why did fans try to burn EA’s house down, when Human Revolution pulled the same thing?
As usual[“As usual.” Fuck you, lazy phrasing. –FM] there are a couple of likely culprits.

Tonality

First there’s the differing tonality of the games. The world of Deus Ex is a shitty place. If you imagined Robocop wandering the streets of Blade Runner, only all the rich people dress like Draculas, you’re pretty close the near-future dystopia as presented. Also you can punch hookers, because player freedom. One of the big themes throughout the whole game is that there are no stellar good guys, just variations on self-absorbed cyborg plutocrat. Well, except for the dudes who killed your buddies. You have to kill someone. When the final story-buttons hit and they all go to bad-ish endings, the player isn’t too thrown.
Contrast this with Mass Effect. The games are obviously grand in scope, with long, melodramatic histories and backstories for every race and culture. The default “good” playstyle is called the Paragon path (and let’s not kid ourselves, Paragon is the assumed default). In it players are assumed to be bringers of justice and right to the off-brand Lensemen universe. Planets are saved. Evil space crabs are destroyed. And your crew’s emotional problems are all solved. The game lets you be an outright bastard, too. Sure, Jensen [Explain who Jensen is, dammit! – Future Me] might kill a hobo or twenty (player freedom!), but Shepherd can wipe out colonies, turn her back on building full of burning people, kill dozens of people in cold blood, and commit up to four genocides.
But despite those entertaining highs and lows, Mass Effect is never really a morally grey world. You’re either a Space John Wayne or a Space John Wayne Gacy. Attempting to mix and match between the two only makes Shepherd inconsistent, not complicated. The world of Mass Effect is not built for that. It’s built for big, showy, unequivocal moral absolutes. So when the ghost baby asks the player to push the blue or red button (or bonus green!) button, players rightfully expect that same dichotomy. Except not. All the endings are really the same, but with shades of difference. Red is a little more murdery than blue, blue is a little more hippy than red, and green is a little more bewildering then either. But that’s it. Everything is minor variations on the same ending. In a game built for big operatic extremes, all endings keying off the same major beats is jarring. [This should have been brought up higher. This isn’t a magic trick. Make your point, and then support it. Arguments first is just confusing. –FM]

Precedent, and Forget It!

Human Revolution and Mass Effect 3 are both the third entries in already establish brands. Human Revolution had the original Deus Ex and Invisible to draw from. Mass Effect 3 had, well, the other 2. The endings for Deus Ex and Invisible War established the model Human Revolution followed. In both games in the final level the player reaches a point where they are presented with several clear options, and each will lead to a different, singular ending, regardless of all of the player’s actions up to that point. The player then does the required action, and they’re treated to a cutscene where the respective gruff protagonist and some other talky-head discuss their new cyber-paradigm.
Certainly Human Revolution drops the ball a bit. CGI or in-engine cutscenes are traded out for some old stock footage, and the whole sequence bares the hallmarks of the budget-saving hail-mary it is [Conjecture, asshole. –FM]. But the pieces are largely there, and the whole things fits with the others.
Bioware’s space opera ends up damned by its precedent, particularly Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 1 is a fairly [find a better word] linear game. Planet quests exist in their own little pockets with no crossover. The majority of choices have implied consequences, rather than seen. The only major choices that make a broad impact on the game are whether you save dinosaur-turtle-man, and whether you kill off racist lady or the blandest man in space. Everything else was destined. You climb the tower and shoot the evil badguy. Maybe you killed the Council at the end. That changes roughly 3 lines of dialogue.
But Mass Effect 2 made all sorts of promises. “Import your game,” it said, “and your choices will all have big meaning!” And to demonstrate, Mass Effect 2 changes stuff based on your decisions in 1. Now the brand is about lasting choices. That moral dilemma? That shit’s coming back. Did you turn in the space-bugs’ murder factor to Martin Sheen? That definitely is coming back. And then nope. Closed loop. It was bound to happen. Very very few games pull off widely divergent endings without cutting corners, and even fewer pull it off well. Trimming everything back down to a finite, manageable number of endings was one of the smartest thing Bioware could do. But it went against the spirit of their own PR and marketing, and therefore the player’s expectations.

Where Drama Lives

Despite both being science fiction action-RPGs with named protagonists, Human Revolution and Mass Effect hang the majority of their narrative investment in very different places. Human Revolution is a big plotty space. It’s politics, conspiracies, and hobo murder. The majority of characters are at best ciphers, having only enough backstory to justify their particular ideologies. “I’m an industrialist, so I like technology.” “I’m religious fanatic, so I hate technology.” “I’m an Asian woman stereotype, so I’m going to betray everyone for no reason.” [Joke is perhaps accurate, but not needed.] Even the interactions are all very thinky-talky-head stuff. Characters might talk about their emotions for a single card, but you’re always one dialogue choice away from musing about Cartesian anxiety in a post-human society.
When the final story buttons lead to different rambly, naval-gazy musing over NPR footage, it isn’t completely different from what players have been getting from the story. Does it resolve many character arcs? Not really. But it’s the protagonist getting quasi philosophical about Big Issues™. And in a weird way it kind of works. Sure, it’s not ideal. We all wanted something more satisfying than that, especially after that boss fight where we shot the cyber-BDSM chicks  in the metal clamshells. But it maintains the heart of the Deus Ex story: self-serious pop-philosophy.
Mass Effect is all about the characters (well, some of them). Sure, there are the space crabs to worry about. And techno-zombies. And Martin Sheen. But that’s not really why players care about Mass Effect. For Mass Effect fans, the ones who would unmake reality with their anger, the team members on the Normandy were the main attraction. Curing the genophage is only important because your dinosaur-turtle buddy is against it [Against the genophage, not curing it. Sentence should be clearer.] (and, later, your funny-talking gecko doctor). Stopping the war between the flashlight people and the flashlight Terminators only matter because it might make your lady and robo-dude flashlights sad. Your investment in Mass Effect depended almost entirely on how much you cared about your space entourage. And to it’s credit, 99% of Mass Effect 3 milked the hell out of this. The amount of fan service moments in the course of ME3 is staggering. And that’s not strictly a negative. As popular entertainment it knew exactly what its draw was, and it played it for all it was worth.
Except for that 1%. It just happened to be at the end. This elaborate, epic, space opera, after dozens of hours of hours playing on the character interactions, then removes all of the characters. They’re replaced with a ghost baby. And ghost baby wants to talk to you about Cartesian anxiety [Used that one already. Find another smug reference.] in a post-human world. There’s a very little support for it from a plot perspective, and thematically ghost baby’s obsession with the Big Idea™ of Man versus Machine is a C-line at best. But the most befuddling thing is the absence of all of your space pals in this segment. It’s just you, the buttons, and a translucent toddler that wants to wax philosophical. That baby does not care about your on-again off-again romance with blue lesbian Spock. The baby will not trade quips with you like dinosaur-turtle-man or cat-bird-lobster-man. That baby wants to convince you you’re playing a different game. A game with Big Ideas™. And it falls flat. [Ending is trying to be too strong. Even if it does fall flat: 1) have I really supported it; 2) is that even my conclusion; 3) is it a conclusion worth publishing?]

A Plague of Arrows: Yes, I’m Actually Explaining the Joke

Look at this guard. What do you know about him? He doesn’t have a name. He doesn’t have a face. You don’t know him. You don’t know his friends or family, or if he even has either. To you he’s background noise as you navigate the city-scapes of Skyrim, with no more history, hopes, or dreams than the shrubs. Well, except for one thing (all together now):

He was once and adventurer like you, until he took an arrow to the knee.

There’s a lot of information in that statement. Now you know that this guy lived a life of danger. He raided burial mounds, fought bandits, and collected piles of treasure. He was living the medieval fantasy equivalent of the good life. Then one fateful day, a single arrow shattered his knee. The injury was too severe for the healers to do anything about. His bum knee is too much a liability to keep up the adventuring life. Now he’s a lowly town guard, the equivalent of the desk job, never to see the adventuring life again.

That’s a hell of a specific story, even with a lot of those details being assumed parts of the standard narrative. As far as character backgrounds go, it’s not bad. If you learned that detail about Guardsman Greg, you’d think, “tough luck, Greg.” Then you’d steal all his shit, ensuring that he’ll never get that promotion. Normally that would be the end of it.

But life in Skyrim is not that kind to guards. You walk down to the end of the street to find Greg’s pal, Guardsman Steve. And you learn, strangely, Steve was also once an adventurer. And he also had his career stolen by an injury. And wouldn’t you know it, it was also to the knee. And you go to a third guard, and it’s the same. And a fourth. And so on. And before you realize it, there’s only one of two explanations:

1) There’s a serial sniper out there, looking to ruin the lives of adventurers.

2) You’re playing a video game.

Now, I know I’ve said in previous blogs that the player always knows they’re playing a video game, and we aren’t going to fool them into thinking otherwise. I’m not trying to contradict that. Where the Arrow-in-the-knee bit is problematic is that it is an unintentional break in the agreed parameters in the player’s reading of the game. The player understands that the compass and quest text and the unsustainable bandit population are all part of the game’s conventions. These mechanical elements are not immersion breaking because the player understands they’re part of the media.

The same is true with interacting with the game world and NPCs. If an NPC has a specific name, he is a particular individual in the world of Skyrim, and his dialogue and place in the world are therefore allowed a good degree of specificity. Bartleby the Blacksmith can have a birthday, a social security number, and a tragic, unfulfillable balloon fetish. If Bartleby dies, that’s the end of Bartleby and his temporally-inappropriate looner desires.

If the NPC’s name is actually a job or archetype, he’s a faceless mook, interchangeable with anyone else with the same name. Assassin is just a jerk that kills people for money. Kill Assassin, and it’s completely okay if you encounter another Assassin five minutes later.

That is, so long as the fidelity on Assassin’s written content is dialed back. “I’ve got you now!” and “I sure do like money,” are just about the right sort of innocuous tone for an infinitely repeating faceless mook. It’s in line with his place in the world as presented to the player, while creating no incongruities. Now, if every third Assassin yells, “I have a lazy ovary!” then suddenly there’s a dissonance.

And players are smart. They know how that shit is supposed to read. It’s like in the difference between noticing the seams in Kermit’s face and seeing a boom mic drop down into frame: The viewer understands to ignore the physical reality of the seams, and invest in the character being portrayed; but that boom mic, that was an unintentional goof by someone on the crew, and now the viewer is just watching a manufactured piece.

No player seriously reads Skyrim as being plagued by handicapped guards. If the same reading convention for all the other mook lines—that they’re safe to take at face value for everyone of that archetype—is applied to the arrow story, then the world of Skyrim contains an element of farce at odds with the rest of the work. (Here I’m ignoring M’aiq the Liar and other smaller, clearly intentional elements.)

To be completely fair to Bethesda, by and large they were spot-on in avoiding this problem with their dialog. Bandits and assassins say appropriately mean but generic things. Named NPCs have varying degrees of backstory and personalities, with no blatant repetition. Given the scope of the game, this is impressive as hell.

It’s the high level of control on the rest of the game dialogue that made the arrow-to-the-knee meme take off. The fidelity is too high, too specific. It creates dissonance in the narrative. That dissonance is the source of the humor in the meme. Nearly every permutation of the joke revolves around X being a Y, until X takes an arrow to the knee. It’s that specific detail, “arrow to the knee”, that is the punch line. We laugh (maybe) because the joke is presenting the narrative exactly how Skyrim suggests it should be read.

So if you find yourself writing barks, mook dialogue, or any other repetitive content, take care you know in what context your words will be read. Details can enrich a narrative, but careless detail can just as easily break it. You can’t always rely on your game being a runaway hit to redeem it.

SR3 Fun: Ben from Full Throttle

Hey guys. Sorry for the downtime. If you've been following CCP news at all, you can probably gather things have been a bit busy in the last few months.

As a shameless distraction, here's Full Throttle's Ben lovingly recreated in the Saints Row 3 Initiation Station.

Deus Ex: Gonna Go Back in Time

If you’re at all into them-there video games, you probably know that Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits the US this week. Like many nerds of my age bracket, I can’t wait to put on some mirror shades and fight the technocratic oligarchy. (Scientists now believe Invisible War would have sold a billion more units if the PCs had mirror shades.)

If you haven’t played Deus Ex (because you weren’t a PC gamer at the time, you aren’t into FPSes, or— god help us— you weren’t fucking born yet), the game still has a lot to offer a modern player.

Deus Ex is a cyber-punk FPS-RPG that depicts a world rebuilding after a devastating economic collapse. Sovereign nations are giving way to a global community. New advances in technology at once give governments a tighter grip, but also empower rebellious factions and civil war. And the hero is a nanotechnologically enhanced super-soldier, working for an counter-terrorism group formed after a terrorist attack on New York City.

In short, it is almost the perfect representation of the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

Except it came out in 2000.

Okay, back up again. That stuff I said up there about the plot? With the terrorists and the technology boom and the governments collapse? That’s all true. Those things happen. But I’m selectively elevating certain elements. These are the bits that stick out to me as I’m playing back through. These are the parts that are reverberating, bouncing around in my 2011 head.

Something’s off, though. It’s not like the game only became a hit after 9/11. I’m irrationally proud to say I played Deus Ex when it dropped in 2000, and I played the shit out of it. The story was just as strong then as it was a year later. But what was Deus Ex actually reacting to?

Buckle up for a journey in the Wayback Machine. We’re taking a trip to the 90s.

(Also, fuck New Critics.)

Do you remember the 90s? It’s okay if you don’t. It was a bit of a shit decade. Parachute pants, grunge, Howard Stern, Russian mob, Windows 95 release parties. When 90s nostalgia comes around, I will force VH1’s “I Love the 90s” off the air with my pure hate until people forget that horrible null space of human development.

Shit, where am I? Right, the 90s. There’s some stuff that’s easy to forget now.

If you forgot or were absent, we were actually paranoid as fuck about terrorism before 9/11. And it seemed not without warrant. There was the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The US embassies in Kenya and Tanzia were bombed in 1998. Jihadist terrorists have been kicking around long before that, but we’ll stick with the 90s here.

So yeah, Deus Ex already had a lot of terrorist stuff to play off of. Except foreign terrorists weren’t the biggest boogeyman at the time. It was us.

There was this fear in the back of the American consciousness that we were a country coming apart at the seems. Ruby Ridge and its big-budget sequel, Waco, in the early 90s gave us the image of US agencies violently botching raids on US citizens. With bullets. And fire. I think there was a tank, too. The Oklahoma city bombing—the big sumbitch of the 90s—showed the destructive potential individuals could pose to those very same agencies. And with the arrest of Ted Kaczynski in 1996, the series of events got its meta-narrative through an American-bred-crackpot’s manifesto.

For a while, it seemed that around was a group of survivalist nuts out in Montana preparing for the next American Revolution against big government. So when Deus Ex set told 2000 players they were fighting a group of domestic terrorists called the Northwest Secessionist Forces, they weren’t whiting up the terrorists (thanks, Sum of All Fears). Domestic terrorism was demonstrably a very real threat. When Deus Ex was released, it had only been 5 years since Oklahoma City. We’re twice that past 9/11 now. Unless something bigger happens, it takes a while to forget that shit.

There are a host of other things going on in the story that still work, but have lost some of their context. Like greys. Remember them? The little alien dudes that just couldn’t get enough of abducting people. They were bigger than fat Elvis. Fire in the Sky, The X-Files, Men in Black, etc., made greys and the related men-in-black common figures in the popular conscious. So, Deus Ex is a game about government conspiracies and stabbing MiB’s in the face with a laser sword? Gotta have some greys in there. (Granted, making them mutated venom-spitting monkeys was goddamn outta left field.)

Speaking of X-Files, any discussion of the original Deus Ex has to bring up FEMA. In Deus Ex, the bad guys plot to overthrow the US government with injudicious use of FEMA’s emergency powers. Declare emergency, declare martial law and nullify the constitution. Today, that plot sounds goddamn ridiculous. Well, okay in 2000 it was crazy-pants paranoia stuff too, but it wasn’t zany. But in 90s conspiracy theory land, the emergency powers FEMA could use were a popular topic. Sure, FEMA hadn’t overthrown the government yet, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t. Post-Katrina? Obama’s Death Panels sound like a more reasonable threat.

Millennialism was also big. That giant round magic number was coming up, and goddamn if we weren’t heading towards something apocalyptic because of it. Suicide cults were offing themselves to get on the Hale-Bopp comet. Angel sightings were vying for real estate with the greys. And we were paranoid as fuck that our technology was out to get us.

Oh, I can still taste that sweet Y2K paranoia. All of our computers were going to run out of magic year bits when the year hit 2000, making every computer convinced it was Jesus-o-clock. The punishment for our folly was going to be the simultaneous collapse of the internet, banking, and a huge fuck-off nuclear holocaust. Y2K clearly didn’t destroy civilization, and looking back at it all you can really see is a number of embarrassing newscasts and sitcom episodes about stockpiling canned tomatoes. But Deus Ex builds off the millennial tone perfectly. Deus Ex presents a world filled with hubris and apocalypse, all through a veil of anxiety over the progress of technology.

So where does that leave the current reading of Deus Ex? Are people going to enjoy it less without the 90s anxieties and concerns pulsing in their heads? Of course not. I played Deus Ex on a nearly yearly basis for ten years after launch, and I forgot most of that 90s shit in the first two. Hell, I had to Google half of that just to write this up.

Deus Ex is a large and complicated game that asks a lot of political and philosophical questions. Its questions aren’t about the 90s any more than they’re about post-9/11. They’re about the relationship between power and corruption, security and freedoms, and the march of technology. The topics and events that Deus Ex presents can be read and re-interpreted in almost any year, and the odds are good that the reading will hold up. Like any good work, it lives beyond its original context and loses none of its real impact.

And that is why you should just goddamn play Deus Ex.

Pictures Are Like Content

Hey all. No big post today. I hope to have something ready for you a bit later on.

As an apology/distraction, I offer a picture of this amazing piece of promotional brilliance.

Item Descriptions: Your First Steps Into Madness

You’re a writer on a moderately-sized game studio. The world build is solid. Your lore bible is synergizing the shit out of people,  like Moses and MLK forming Voltron at a team-building camp. And those scenarios you’ve worked on with the LDs? Nobody will ever forget the Omaha Beach Bouncy Castle level.

Wait, what’s that creeping up the schedule? Surprise! GD’s got a collection of some 200 items ready for production. Grab your hammer, word smith, because it’s time to stamp out item descriptions, the hubcaps of video game writing.

1. What’s Your Word Budget?

Words per item. Figure this out. Live by it. Adopt it as your new god. Worship it above all others. Render the temple of your fathers to dust in the name of the word budget.

A word budget is not precisely word count. Word count measures the whole deliverable. How many words you have to play with for all the descriptions. The word count itself is determined through a lot of factors (memory, localization costs, etc.), but I’m assuming the larger word count was set elsewhere in the great chain of production.

The word budget is instead how many words you get to use for any given description. At the simplest level, you can figure out your budget with some magic middle-school level algebra:

Word Count / Number of Items = Word Budget

Let’s say you have a total word count of 30k to work with. With 200 items, that leaves you with a budget of 150 words per item. For most games, that’s pretty damn good.

Keep in mind that, in a vacuum, the word budget is something that can be shifted around. Let’s say of those 200 items, 50 are super special death-spitting guns that GD wants to make sure get highlighted. So each of those are bumped up to 250 words. That leaves 17500 words for the rest, or roughly 115 words per item.

Most likely each individual item is going to shift a bit. Some will be a bit above, some a bit below. Just remember that when you use extra words in one, you’re really taking them from elsewhere. If you remain faithful to the budget, your work will look consistent and production won’t have an aneurism.

If all of your descriptions keep blasting past the budget, and you don’t make the cuts yourself, someone else is going to do the cutting. And if you make the boss man cut back your words, it won’t take him long to figure out it’s easier to just cut you.

2. What Information Are You Communicating?

Item descriptions can end up doing a lot of work. Generally speaking, there are about four common jobs: Quick Reference, Mechanics Explanation, Lore, and Cheap Joke.

Quick Reference

Just what the hell is this item? In an ideal world the name would cover this case. But even the clearest naming convention can get confusing for a player, particularly in a game with a lot of items. Sometimes the best thing for it is to slam in a bit of text spelling out what the item is.

“This is a gun. It can be used to murder people.”

Sweet. Now the player knows this item can be used to murder. Quick, clean, direct.

If you have a particularly lengthy description, make sure this bit gets to the top. A player calmly looking for lore or to crunch the numbers on the stats will breeze past the quick reference without much complaint. A player frustrated and confused by your items will have no tolerance for your epic Jim Henson’s Storyteller bullshit. They’ll hate your game and you if you make them trudge through just do find out what the damn bauble he’s looking at is.

Mechanics Explanation

So we know what the object is, but what the hell does it do? Does it spit bullets? Does it heal you? Does it pop up when the turkey’s done? How many gold pieces is it really worth?

Many modern games now have magic UI elements spit most of this out with no authored words. Most MMO players are familiar with the now ubiquitous DPS stat on their weapon descriptions, as well as the usual array of stat bonuses. Check with your UI guys to see what’s being covered by the system. Retreading ground is sloppy, and uses up precious words. Words you can use on cheap jokes.

Sometimes the item has a mechanic that the generated stat block doesn’t handle. Take the Potion of Regicide. This diabolical poison is specially designed to only kill royal characters (i.e., it will instantly kill the quest target, but doesn’t work anywhere else, so screw you). So it’s best you put something appropriate in the text.

“Right-click to activate, left-click on target: Use this to instantly kill King Reginald. Will not work on non-royal characters.”

And hey, remember the UI guys? They probably have a style guide they’d like everything to follow. And it turns out mechanics should be in green. So play nice. Green it up.

“Right-click to activate, left-click on target: Use this to instantly kill King Reginald. Will not work on non-royal characters.”

Lore

Lore in item descriptions is not a universal thing. Some games go nuts with lore info. Others play it conservatively.

A story-heavy RPG can use item descriptions to deliver great tomes of lore. That Glowing Sword of Pain-Stab? Turns out it’s the sword used by Grothar to kill the Old Gods, in the Time Before Dreams Ended. Kind of a big deal. But there’s no room in the schedule to get that worked into your VOed quests or any of the promo material. Cheapest solution is to write up some text and staple it right to the motherfucker. You’re up, writer-dude! Vomit forth many words!

By contrast, a sci-fi FPS can be relatively light on words. The Tridoclops Arms Sniper Rifle will have maybe fifty words. “This gun has a 20,000 inch barrel, and is used to assassinate moons.” Hooray! Back to shooty!

Depending on the project you might get a lot or only a little creative freedom here. An IP with a strict bible and a lot of hands in the lore bucket is probably going to have a quadrillion eyes on the item descriptions. Other games, particularly those with original IPs, may have the majority of their world build created through item descriptions. Just make sure you know which one you’re doing before you try to establish the tortured history of your primary trading town in the description of a vendor-trash trout carcass.

Cheap Joke

Despite its general uselessness, this is actually the second most common element in item description strings (after mechanics). It’s not terribly surprising. There’s a long tradition of one-line jokes attached to items, going back to Diablo, Magic cards, and D&D critters/items before that.

But the real reason—the super secret one that we all have to cop to if we’re pushed—is that we do them to entertain ourselves. We have 200 goddamn descriptions to burn through. Any writer left to his own devices long enough starts going to Silly Town (usually with their trusty sidekick, beer, in tow). If the writer isn’t being checked by a peer review or editor, the writer’s slow decent into madness will be documented well in the form of puns and pop culture references.

That’s not to say joke descriptions are always a negative. World of Warcraft famously took the trend and made it a part of their style. Even EVE Online, the dark science fiction game of cheating your friends, has had some success with cheap jokes.

When EVE Content made an item called “the Device”, we were well down the road to Silly Town. One of our mandates at that time was to only create items that can be reused multiple times. The more generic, the better. So when it came time to create another item retrieval mission, one of our writers decided to poke lightly at both the policy and the whole MacGuffin structure to MMO missions. It commanded the player to retrieve an object, simply called the “Device.” Its description read:

This is a thing. It does stuff.

Now again, this was—at its core—a cheap joke on our part to amuse ourselves. But goddamn if players didn’t latch onto it. The Device developed its own following in the community. It has a facebook page. Its been used in trivia contests. A year later another writer came along and found the object, and decided to change the description to something a self-respecting professional would write. The fan outcry was so immediate that the text was reverted within a week of the patch note going out.

So yes, be careful with your cheap jokes. Maintain tone, and treat your property with the respect it deserves. But the occasional joke can be damned powerful.

3. What Are Your Narrative Tools?

This last part is seemingly simple, but its also the part that’s easiest to be inconsistent with. Just what narrative tools will you be using in your item descriptions? What voice are you using? What’s the style?

Most games just chuck the old D&D style description at things. Omniscient third, maybe with some second-person sensory stuff if you feel like it. And that’s perfectly doable. So many games come from the D&D mold that the GM-speak description seems natural. But if that’s the route you’re going to go, make sure its consciously.

Suppose you’re working in a spy property. Why work in generic terms for your item descriptions? Make the descriptions excerpts from CIA intel. Or what if your game is actually being framed by a storyteller character? Write the item descriptions in his voice, and let his personality seep in. In each case you’re not just conveying all the information you wanted, but your enriching the narrative of the world itself. This is double-awesome-win.

The Fourth Wall

Before I close, I’ll briefly touch the fourth wall issue. The odds are good that unless you’re working in an extremely jokey property or you’re otherwise working in a meta conceit, you do not want to directly remind the player he’s playing a video game in the fluff text.

The key phrase there is in the fluff text. Yes, keep your delicate world building and jokes and sagas in their appropriate mode, and don’t break immersion when you don’t have to. But if you’re trying to communicate something important to the player that could directly impact the way he interacts with the game, err on the side of clarity. Immersion is great, but the effect of breaking the fourth wall is too often overplayed for fear of taking the player out of the game.

Players know they’re playing a video game. They aren’t fooled by our bright flashing lights and loud noises into thinking they’ve entered some dream world.

Unless they’re epileptic.

But if it relates to a mechanic that it would be best the player has a clear understanding of, just outright tell it. If the game is any fun, the player will quickly get over the break in character. A mechanic obfuscated by fancy words or over-contextualization, however, will kick a player out of your world faster than any errant mention of mouse buttons.

In short, be kind to your player. Be clear.

KotOR Replay 03: SPAAACE BLACKJAAACK

I’m walking around Taris, right? I just got done murdering a Sith officer and a couple of faceless troopers for being unpleasant to a jabbering alien guy (an alien guy whom—it must be noted—seemed to have some experience completely vanishing dead bodies). So, like you do after successfully killing intergalactic authority figures, I’m off to the bar to celebrate.

(Wait, sorry. I meant I’m off to the cantina. Because one scene in Star Wars took place in a cantina, the rest of the goddamn universe is robbed of bars, saloons, lounges, taverns, and dives. It’s like there are only two types of eatery licenses available: cantinas, and that Silver Diner Obi Wan went to when he was too lazy to do his own homework.)

I get to the bar (fuck you, Star Wars style guide), and there’s some dude standing around asking if I want to play cards. Only he calls it Pazaak. Sure, okay, like in the old west, right? Well, see, it turns out it’s not so much. It’s a lot like cards. Hell, it’s a lot like blackjack. But someone’s gone and spaced it all up.

I’m not trying to make 21, I’m trying to make 20.

And I don’t just take whatever the hell I’m dealt. I get to play special cards from my hand, like in hold’em.

But instead of each player being dealt from the same deck, I only get to use cards that you own, like in Magic.

And there are these special cards, see, that allow me to switch up the values of the cards and OH MY GOD I WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE, SPACEMAN.

For the life of me there are two things I will never fully appreciate about modern RPGs:

1) Every RPG developer feels the need to include a gambling mini-game.

2) Every RPG developer feels the need to reinvent gambling games.

KotOR is not the only RPG to do this bullcrappery. Witcher has its dice games. Mass Effect has Quasar. New Vegas. Etc. And each time it ends up annoying me.

My main problem is this: Pazaak is making the familiar strange—needlessly.

Almost every time a relatively straightforward game is muddied up and overcomplicated for no good reason. To go back to Pazaak, the game is goddamn blackjack. But sure, there’s no blackjack in Star Wars. So target number is changed to 20. Whatever. But there’s a hand to play from. Now it’s self-indulgent. On top of that, there are special wild cards that make it wacky. Now we’re in silly-land.

Why was blackjack so bad? Are there that many GDs with frustrated dreams of being tabletop designers, and this is the only way that their designs see the light of day in a world where physical gaming products are a dying market?

Oh, right.

But that still doesn’t mean it’s a good reason. Mini-games should not be a place to work through creative frustrations and insecurities.

That’s what blogs are for.

Here I give some credit to New Vegas, for sticking to traditional gambling games for the most part. I get slot machines, I get roulette, I get blackjack. Didn’t have to wasteland it all up just for its own sake.

I blame Star Trek’s Tri-D chess for this. If you don’t know, in Star Trek everyone plays three-dimensional chess. It’s like normal chess, but instead of one flat board there are three or four smaller boards in a weird sort of tower. And what are the rules? Spock kicks everyone’s ass until Kirk does something unexpected. That’s fucking it because it doesn’t need real rules. It serves the same damn function as normal chess.

Wikipedia tells me that there are three-dimensional chess variants, but Star Trek didn’t give a shit. It’s a visual gag, pure and simple. So long as it stays chess but with a visual gimmick, all’s fine with the world. The instant understanding the special space rules of Tri-D chess become important to following the plot, some writer is going to writer hell. SPACE CHESS, MOTHERFUCKER. SPOCK’S GOOD AT IT. END WORLD BUILD.

It’s the same with mini-games in a larger video game. What’s important is that the space game serves the same narrative role as whatever it’s standing in for. So Pazaak is like poker, right? I’m the goddamn space cowboy, and wandered into the saloon cantina, and I’m gonna win a space ship off of Lando. You remember that part, right? Han won the Millennium Falcon off of Lando in a game of chance. Probably some form a space cards. They don’t tell you what game it was, but you can guess it was probably something cowboyish, given that it was Han. A game of chance that involved skill, but ultimately can go to either player given the right conditions.

You know, like blackjack.

You know what it probably didn’t involve? Han scouring the universe for three hours so he could find the super-ultra-rare Blue Eyed God Fucker for his black deck. But that’s the Pazaak experience. It’s blackjack, but with the random bits of CCG design thrown in to prolong the consequence-less closed-loop experience despite serving no mechanical function and violating the only narrative purposes it had.

Pazaak isn’t about being a space cowboy. It’s about being a space nerd who drops way too much time and money into building my awesome deck, so my deck can be the best in the universe and all the jabbering, cop-killing aliens will stop laughing at me.

Again, going to give props to New Vegas here. Just a classic mix of casino games and cowboy aesthet—OH WHAT THE HELL, CARAVAN.