Comments on: On Brevity

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:11:04 +0000

Thanks! I reserve the right to keep writing about videogames on here; I just want to avoid the long-winded treatises and just mention stuff I like.

By: Lena_P

Lena_P — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:45:14 +0000

First off, let me say I’m sorry for responding to your response at so late a date, but I actually sketched off my comment right before leaving on a short trip so just got back to my internet connection. And when I return I find you will no longer be posting on video game writing. Here I’ve sat, reading your posts for months, I finally get the courage to post a comment, only for it to be my last chance to do so! So I decided to be rude and respond to an old post.
Second off, let me say thank you for your posts. As a prose writer who’s a gamer, I’ve always been interested in writing for games, but couldn’t really understand how it was done. I had thought that it must be vaguely like writing a choose-your-own-adventure book, but beyond that I just didn’t get it. I’ve gained a much better understanding from your posts. I still could never design and create a game on my own, but I have a much greater appreciation for what does go into making one.
Third off, rebuttal! Well, kind of. When I said concise, I definitely did not mean short. And to me, story is not merely a recounting of events, and it’s definitely not just a plot outline you hand to the reader/player and say, “There you go! Do with it as you will! And have fun blowing stuff up.” I’m not familiar with Roy Blount Jr.’s work, but from what you say and have said in previous posts, he sounds like a writer who has no superfluities in his work. That might sound odd, but you say he rambles, goes off at tangents but then ties it all together. Seems to me, the rambling, the tangents, that’s the story.
I had a teacher when I was kid, he was the advisor of our storytelling club. He was from the South, had a soft, slow drawl and was kind of a shy guy, but he told tall tales and scary stories better than all the professional storytellers I’ve met since. What he taught our club was that all the descriptions, all the repetitions were what made the story. They set up the tension, created a rhythm and turned a chain of events that could be described in about 45 seconds into a full experience that stays with you for years. Or millenia, if you’re talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey. And while Mr. Blount may not have had the years Homer did to perfect his stories, I still bet he worked awful hard to get each sentence just right.
And as for turning on and off light switches, well, I think they’re fun because they are character building. (And involve Trogdor, but still, my point stands!) At Telltale you guys seem to do it so naturally, but when the “extras” in a game don’t match, they stand out like a sore thumb. Like Twilight Princess. The bug girl with her side quest, mini-game thing always bothered me. She’s cute and all, and her gothic lolita/Victorian styling does kind of fit into Twilight Princess what with the Old West town near the Gorons feeling like a Native American village lifted out of an episode of the Wild, Wild West (Only without the B-52 hairdos.), but catching bugs is really kind of a weird thing to do when the world is falling apart. And her house was really cool looking, but it looked like a little too much work went into it. Like, almost as much work as went into the Zora world which is supposed to be a much more important location, but is far less distinctive and imaginative than Bug Girl’s house.
In comparison, the side quests in Psychonauts really added to the game. The scavenger hunt is the kind of thing you expect to find at a summer camp, and it’s good training in your powers. Plus a lot of the extras like reading the tree rings at the monument in the parking lot are funny, and help to explain more about the world in the game. You can get through just fine without them, but they actually add depth if you take the time to enjoy them.
That’s what I think excites me most about games. The ability to really explore the world created for us. Not in the open sandbox sense, but the ability to experience the story in different ways. When I come up with a story I have to figure out the best way to tell it, and I stick to that one telling. You can maybe do the flashbacks of different people thing or something similar, but still, I’m the one determining what the reader sees and when and decide everything out before hand. Which I’m fine with. But the thought that I could create a single story that could be experienced different ways, even if they were only subtle differences, that just seems fun. Like in a story I wrote, a character chases after a thief who broke into her room at night. She’s half asleep in a strange town and the thief easily loses her, only to be later caught by a cop who’d been ordered to keep an eye on the heroine. In a game, maybe the chase could be played, with two possible results. Either she loses him like in my story, or she catches him, with the cop coming up and nabbing the thief soon after she gets him, but not before the thief mentions a name, a character the player hasn’t met yet, but will soon. The end result of the chase is very similar, and it’s pretty much still the same story, but the player gets an extra “clue” if they play well. Rather than branching off into different plot lines, it’s more like you get slightly different perspectives.
And as to word counts, well, if you don’t have to deal with them let me just say I wish I could get hired at Telltale! It’s hard enough finding magazines that still publish fiction, but a lot of them want 6,000 words or less, AND they want strong characters who develop through the story. I can’t do that in 10,000 words. After much blood, sweat and tears I can manage to come up with an idea that fits into around 12,000, but I still end up filing away about 75% of my ideas for those novels I’ll write when I get enough published to get an agent.
So after writing 1103 words on being concise, I’d like to summarize. I’ve enjoyed reading about your writing on writing, I’d probably consider Roy Blount Jr. a concise oral storyteller who just happens to write his stuff down, Bug Girls don’t belong in Hyrule, but scavenger hunts at camp are fun, and I wish I could write without worrying about a wordcount, too. Thank You, and Good Night.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:13:36 +0000

Of course I’m not starting a campaign against being succinct (all evidence to the contrary); that would be absurd. The only issue I’ve got with the advice “be concise” is that it can keep writers focused on the clock or the word count, instead of the creative process. Every piece of writing should say no more and no less than what it needs to; the trick, as you mention, is deciding exactly what it needs to say. Where I’d disagree with your comment is in deciding what is superfluous:

Good storytelling is when every line in a novel, every scene in a play or movie is there only when it furthers the story.

I’d say that’s efficient storytelling, not necessarily good storytelling. I need traffic signs and fire extinguisher instructions to be efficient; stories, I don’t mind if they ramble. (One of my favorite writers is Roy Blount, Jr., and he wanders around, goes off on tangents and digressions, repeats himself, and somehow almost always manages to tie it all together at the end).

And many of my favorite moments in games have been the ones that don’t really further any story, but are included just for the hell of it. A random comment or a joke, or some meaningless interaction like turning lights on and off or looking at random objects. You could go through some justification that say those moments are storybuilding because they develop character or they establish interactive parameters of the world, but that’d be pushing it. They’re just there for fun.

The reason I think games have unique difficulties when it comes to this topic is because there’s such a big push for the writing to be purely functional. Get in, give the player the minimum amount of information he needs to continue, and get out; the real artistry of a videogame is in the game design. I say there’s room for artistry everywhere, as long as it all works in concert and there’s no one part that detracts from everything else.

So I say the best advice for videogame writing is the same as for any other type of writing: not “it should be short,” but “it should be short when it needs to be short, and long when it needs to be long.”

By: Lena_P

Lena_P — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:32:43 +0000

Mr. Collie, if that is not your real name, I am a fan of your work and I am only a rookie prose writer myself so I am truly sorry if what I’m about type seems disrespectful, but what is good writing if it is not concise writing? You say a throw away line in a game is worse than a throw away line in a movie, and I don’t think it is. Good storytelling is when every line in a novel, every scene in a play or movie is there only when it furthers the story. This does not mean I consider Hemingway to be the greatest storyteller known to man, frankly I’ve never read his stuff because it sounds uninteresting to me, but being concise MEANS ejecting the superfluous, and it should be done regardless of medium. Of course, what is and isn’t superfluous depends on the medium for storytelling used. A long, detailed description of a house in a novel is often superfluous. Unless it is really vital to the story, the number and type of light fixtures in the house aren’t really important. But if you present this story as a film, the number and type of light fixtures would become important as the set dressing. If the mansion of a wealthy family is shown to have a single, bare bulb as the only lighting in the dining room, that will influence how the story is told. It’s incongruous and unexpected, the audience will expect it to be meaningful or important, not that the set designer forgot to get a chandelier. Making sure every detail is right is now important. But, if you had a chandelier in dining room and had a two minute shot of just the chandelier in the middle of the scene that would be just as bad as a long description in the novel. It would not be concise. Video games should also be concise, but not just as regards dialog, because that’s not the only way the story is told. For example, in a game like Crazy Taxi or Grand Theft Auto you drive around large, open ended urban areas. But do they really need to get larger and larger with each game? Do you really need another street lined with shops you can’t enter that looks just like the other streets lined with shops you can’t enter? I mean, does it really add to story, or even the gameplay? Level designs should be concise, just as much as the dialog should. Of course, that’s just my opinion, as an outsider and amateur.