About a year and a half ago, I started writing a series of posts on here about “myths of videogame storytelling.” The idea was to take some claim I’d found on the internet about the role of stories in games, and explain why it was hopelessly, incontrovertibly wrong. Here they are, in chronological order for your convenience and protection:

1. Is there anybody going to listen to my story?
   My justification for writing about the topic in the first place.
2. You’ve unlocked… Rosebud!
   Stop rationalizing the failures of videogames as a medium with “games are still young.” Also, stop assuming that games have nothing to learn from movies.
3. Pro Choice
   Player control of the narrative isn’t as important as player agency.
4. Ready… Be fought against!
   “Activity” in storytelling games is more than just pressing buttons, it’s becoming actively engaged in the storytelling.
5. The Old Man and the Realistically Rendered Water Volume
   (A diversion to make fun of a guy I don’t know). If you want to improve the state of videogame writing, stop setting such miserably low expectations of it from the onset.
6. There’s no second chance to make a first impression
   No matter how open-ended and non-linear you try make your game, the player is going to experience it in a line from start to finish.
7. The Calls Are Coming From Within the Ice Level!
   How horror movies often do a better job of interacting with the audience than ostensibly “interactive entertainment.”
8. Who’s in control here?
   Player narrative and developer narrative are equally important.
9. I’m thinking of a number between 1 and You’re Dumb
   A defense of adventure games, and why action games haven’t yet rendered them obsolete.
10. Back off, man. I’m a scientist.
    Good storytelling in games requires a collaboration between the developer and the player.
11. tl;dr;fu
    A brief recap of everything I’d written up to that point.
12. Resident Evil, But They’re in Space!
    (Another diversion). Why Dead Space was a fine game, but games like it will drag down the entire medium until we start demanding more from the storytelling.
13. Feedback’s a bitch
    We can make games demand more of the player without frustrating the player, as long as we treat the game as an ongoing communication instead of a static presentation.
14. Feedback loop
    More about treating games as ongoing communication, this time in regards to scaling difficulty.
15. On Brevity
    Videogames need to remain aware of how discrete pieces of writing will fit together in the final context of the game. Rhythm and flow are more important than length.

And that’s the last of them. They’re generally too dense to encourage any long-term discussion, even if I had time to keep up with the comments. Plus, I’ve now said everything I could possibly say about Portal, BioShock, and Half-Life 2 (at least until Episode 3 comes out).

Most significantly: they take too long to write, and any time spent writing about videogames would be better spent making videogames. These days, there are just too many tools available and too much great inspiration from the independent game developers for anyone to be content just writing hypothetically about how games should work. There’s no excuse not to put the theories into practice.

Brevity is good. But

Myth 11: Videogame writing should be short.

is bad advice. Because, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t say enough.
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Previously on Spectre Collie, I snapped my tether and responded to a critique of games I worked on. The claim was that adventure games are bad at giving feedback to the player, partly because it’s impossible for the game to know what the player’s thinking. I agreed that adventure games are usually lousy at giving feedback, but disagree that it’s a problem unique to adventure games. It’s a problem for any game that requires the player to make deductions more sophisticated than “put the red key in the red door.”

And, I claim, it’s not because videogame puzzles are inherently cerebral, but because we all like to believe that they are. We emphasize the “a-ha!” moments, where the player suddenly figures out the solution to a problem and all the remaining pieces fall into place, at the expense of all the “but what if…?” moments that build up to that. That leaves developers trying to second-guess what’s going to make sense to the player, and leaves the players trying to second-guess what the developers were thinking when they set up this puzzle. And to me, that’s not a fundamental game design problem, but a communication breakdown.

After I posted that, a friend in the comments interpreted the post as saying “games should have in-game hints.” And for some reason, another blog interpreted it as talking about the Strong Bad games instead of Sam & Max. Those are unintended but convenient examples of what can happen when there’s a communication breakdown. It’s also a convenient excuse to give more concrete examples of what I’m talking about, explain why Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the most frustrating game in recent memory, curse Minority Report for repeatedly insulting my intelligence, and say that difficulty levels in videogames are bad.

Myth 10: Player-selected difficulty levels are the best way to ensure a videogame is accessible to the widest possible audience.

First, a reminder: so far, every one of these “videogame myths” is an actual thing I’ve read somewhere on the internet. In this case, it was an argument on a message board I used to read, where one side claimed that including difficulty levels was developer laziness, and the other side claiming that not including them is developer arrogance. Yet another reminder that I need to get a hobby outside of work.

The author of that Design Lessons post made a complaint that was fairly common about the Sam & Max games: the first season was too easy, and the second season got too hard. When the games were first released, they got the most attention from fans of the LucasArts game, people who’d been playing adventure games for years. And now that the first season has been released on the Wii (and the second season is coming soon!) you can see a pretty clear shift in the response: more people complaining about “frustration” and “needing patience.”

What’s interesting to me about all of those is how adamant the reviewers are. You’d rarely if ever hear that the game was too easy or too hard “for me,” but that it was clearly, insultingly easy, and what were the developers thinking? (And, it should be mentioned, every single episode of Sam & Max has had people on the forums asking for hints). Or on the other end, it’s not “I got stuck,” but “the genre is broken and deserved to die.” The OMG INTERNET BIAS!!! implications of this are legion, but that’s a topic better left to irate forum-goers. What’s interesting to anybody working on ostensibly “thinking” games is the realization that there simply is no such thing as a universal standard of difficulty.

And if you cater too much to one group, you’re inevitably going to alienate another. The worst thing you could do would be to shoot for some idea of the “lowest common denominator,” which games are starting to do to an increasingly alarming degree, and which movies have been doing for years.
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