Editor's note: This is a long article published in 2017 by the original author, Darth Roxer. The author points out what he sees as some of the flaws that arise in the creation of modern RPG game texts and gives partial solutions. The day before yesterday we published one of the serials, and the core of the discussion was how to avoid suffering from "fantasy disease" when doing background settings. What you will see today is the second part of the series, where the author tries to explore, in his opinion, what are the deeper causes of this deviation in creation.
It should also be pointed out that the ideas in the article are the author's "family words", but the questions he raises are also worth considering.
Problem 2: Creators who have more than enough energy
In the previous section, I pointed out a major issue that affects the quality of RPG text writing, so it's time to discuss the main causes of this problem. The reason for this lies with the writers themselves.
To discuss this, I'd like to take you to an interview with Tyranny. The guy interviewed was Paul Kirsch, who was the game's narrative designer. On the LinkedIn we can find his profile, and the column of educational experience reads "Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing" and "Master of Arts in Popular Literature".
This is actually what you can see, the resumes of most of the authors who work on video games. There are countless writers who have graduated from literary studies (and many of them English and American literature) or creative writing. At first glance, this major seems to be the right one – who can be more qualified for creative writing than a creative writing graduate who has spent years of hard work?
But let's take a look at the famous writers of science fiction or fantasy fiction who have truly published independently in their own name and have won wide acclaim. The science fiction or fantasy genre is not a very stylish genre in fiction, but many of these famous writers have solid professional backgrounds. Many science fiction writers are scientists themselves, some may be physicists, some chemists or physicians; Famous writers of fantasy novels often have a deep connection with linguistics, historiography or philosophy; Some writers may also be lawyers or journalists. Among these famous writers, there are only a few who learn creative writing when they really read books. Many of those who openly say they have degrees in literature have delved into more specialized disciplines, such as classics.
I have two thoughts on this phenomenon.
First of all, you can divide the disciplinary background of these writers into two broad categories - practical and conceptual. Of course, they all showed their great creativity, but there will be some differences in direction. If the author is engaged in practical scientific research such as natural sciences, then their main work is to solve problems or contribute to the human knowledge base in their own direction. Conceptual learning, such as philosophy or linguistics, involves a variety of epistemological and existential thinking, as well as ways of understanding the world. Even history can involve creativity—through related branches, such as archaeology. Then the point is that none of these fields are purely analytical, which is very different from literary studies.
One might think that a person with some study of literature makes a good writer, but in my opinion, this view is as absurd as saying that a theater historian can be a good actor. Of course, as a creator, it would not be a bad thing to be familiar with the history, traditions and past masterpieces of the genre you specialize in, but the problem is that knowing a field is nothing more than knowing what is already there, but creating is about producing something that has never been done before.
Who can tell you exactly how to choose imagery and organizational structure in order to write a wonderful essay? Who can tell you exactly what every word in a language means, or, conversely, what appropriate words to pick to describe an idea when you have formed an idea in your head? This is not to mention the trade-offs between various synonyms, from "monks push the moon to the door" to "monks knock on the moon to the door" to improve the artistic conception. Who can tell you how to strengthen your pen power? Everyone needs to imitate, but imitation comes to imitate, how do you learn the essence of the writer you imitate, and how can you add your own things on this basis? A true "creative writing major" should be a practical course that involves and attempts to solve these problems, but only if the person teaching the course is a master of the language himself, or to put it more simply, the person who teaches writing must be able to write himself.
Sometimes you have to reflect first
What I'm trying to say is that a linguist knows what the words he writes mean in their words, from grammar to semantics to pragmatics. A social professional, such as a lawyer or journalist, will also be well aware of the power behind language, and that there are occasions where the meaning of a word can be very different. Those who often use a variety of technical terms, such as scientists, also understand the importance of precise terminology. The problem is that this sensitivity and obsession with language, semantics, and wording doesn't exist in many video game copywriters. This is very distressing.
Based on the above discussion, it seems that we can conclude that the literature or creative writing majors that these video game copywriters are studying today have led to them not being able to write well enough. However, this assumption also faces an objective problem: there are indeed many excellent writers who come from majors such as English literature. How can this be explained?
First, we wonder if we can make an exception. But this is not desirable. Because first, it seems very weak, and second, it is not objective - because you may find that they are not very numerous. No, I should say "once they were not quite numerous." Did you find a problem? The word "was", in my opinion, is the key to this problem. That is to say, the problem is not in the majors of English and American literature or creative writing themselves, nor in the students who study them, but in the changes in some other factors.
I just made it clear. Those who studied English and American literature and other professions, now acclaimed famous writers caught up with a good time. When they were studying, the atmosphere in the academic circles of the humanities was much better than it is now. At that time, people didn't need to spend time mixing things with well-fed fields, such as gender studies. Conversely, today's people who look up at the back of their idols and resolutely jump into the pit of literary research or creative writing face the following environment:
1. The requirements of the course for students are very loose, and every student of Puchoxin can easily get a degree;
2. He has great admiration for all postmodern things, and this is reflected in all aspects of the curriculum.
Taken together, these two ills form the foundation of today's rotten RPG text writing. The fruit that grows on such a foundation is naturally impossible to be sweet. These two drawbacks bring about some problems: First, the curriculum is very loose for students, which will make students not need to contribute at all, and feel that they are quite good without contributing. In this way, students are less likely to think about new directions, so new ideas are gone, and creativity is stifled. Second, because students do not want to graduate, the course has to take care of the worst students, and then the overall structure of the course is biased towards preaching, and usually sets some inflexible evaluation standards, cultivates everyone into a mold, and uses the same standards to demand them. Taken together, these further hinder the cultivation of creativity.
That's not the end of it. Further to help is the belief in postmodern values that nothing should be judged or evaluated by others. The belief that problems with undesirable consequences are caused by vague and immutable causes and therefore cannot be changed. There are even more outright denials of the existence of such problems at the root. Finally, and perhaps worstly, the disregard and deconstruction of important ideas in the past ultimately leads to the need to reinvent the wheel again and mindlessly, regardless of whether it is more objective and realistic than the original. This trend of thought that originated in universities and was gripped by postmodern currents eventually killed the most precious foundation of academia – diverse ideas and ideas. And that's where creativity comes in.
So let's take it easy, combined with the previous discussions, to see how a typical creative writing graduate would start his career.
This lucky new person will not have a broad range of knowledge and the ability to use language accurately, and he will no longer want to learn anything. He would feel super confident in his writing skills and be directly immune to any criticism — because growing up, he only heard voices touching his head and praising him. He would be a big guy who created against lists, because the evaluations he received from childhood were based on lists, and if no one provided him with a list of various items, he would not have thought of how to evaluate a thing. With his arrogance, meagre knowledge and ability to retell what he has learned, he will cast his resume to Obsidian Entertainment, where he will become a narrative designer.
We don't have to put much effort into finding an example of this in the real world and examining what impact such a person can have on RPGs. In fact, the interview I mentioned earlier about Tyrant is a great example. I don't actually want to be a game black for "Tyrant", but this game is really too classic to mention.
Mr. McLean refers to Matt Maclean, the designer of obsidian. He was the lead writer on the Tyrant project) When asked how to create a world where "evil wins in the end," he had this to say:
"When I conceive of the world, I find that a lot of my inspiration comes from real history, such as fascism, American excellence, drug lord cartels, big capital, and military power in different eras. All of this gave me inspiration about 'evil wins in the end'. ”
My attitude to this is: please don't say weird things, okay? .gif
Look! It's the ancient drug lord cartel and the big capitalist chaebol!
It's true. You're going to describe the forces of evil in a Bronze Age society, but you're crammed with modern ideas and concepts—dating back to the 19th century at best. Why do you think these ideas and concepts have existed since ancient times? You should also read a primer on ancient Greek history or mythology, right? Go and see the inhuman events that have happened in real ancient history, and these events are enough for 10 "Tyrants".
Let me give you an example. This example comes from the book of Jan Parandowski. This Mr. Prandowski was a 20th-century Polish archaeologist and writer. In his writings, he described Mycenae as follows:
"It all happened in Mycenae, a terrifying castle protected by a high wall of huge stones. The castle is surrounded by bare mountains. The rocks are rust-colored, as if covered with dried blood. The castle is ruled by kings with hearts as hard as iron who only want to grab more gold. Here, there is no such thing as the end of life. All kings eventually died by sword or poison and eventually returned in the form of ghosts to serve in royal tombs. These murderous ghosts appear at night, dressed in golden armor, gold masks and chest guards, and cloaks embellished with gold flakes. To appease these spirits, human animals were generously offered on their graves and supplied with the blood of these sacrifices—but for human animals, this did not frighten them. Shedding their own blood as a sacrifice is a willing thing for them. ”
This is just a city within the limits of ancient Greece. This city can already provide us with such vivid and detailed creative inspiration about "evil forces rule people". If you go to the myths and look at the stories of the gods ruling the world, there are many similar examples. Unpredictable gods sometimes torment people living on earth, for no reason, sometimes just for fun.
The problems caused by not doing enough homework and lack of background knowledge are still quite a few in "Tyrant". This problem is also closely related to some of the other problems mentioned above, such as misuse without clarifying the meaning of words. In the early promotional materials of Tyrant, you will find numerous examples of ignorance and fearlessness, especially those related to the "Bronze Age in real history." For example, in the game, they say that the light scouts correspond to the Greek hoplites, which is speechless "Troops" should be the opposite type. That said, the writers of "The Tyrant" did not understand who the proper historical terms referred to.)
In addition, you will see descriptions of one side of the army being able to easily defeat their enemies because that side is equipped with better iron weapons and armor, rather than holding weakly exploded bronze weapons like their enemies. The origin of this description is probably the setting in some RPG player manuals, for example, the attack bonus of bronze weapons is 0, and the iron weapons are 1 (Translation: The slot here is that the early iron weapon forging technology is immature, there will be too hard or too soft problems, but it is not necessarily possible to bargain in front of bronze weapons whose forging technology has matured, so it is not objective to say that bronze weapons can be hung as soon as they get iron weapons. The irony of the author is that the writers don't really understand the logic of history, but only apply some "historical models" simplified for gameplay in RPG rule books). These writers don't make these mistakes even if they spend a little time doing some research. Isn't that better than dwelling on the physics of bullpens, clocks, and candles in this world? Make up for these mistakes and brag about how thoughtful the world you have created is, and how thoroughly you have eaten through the details of the Bronze Age.
"Tyrant" I hacked here first. What we need to discuss now is another, more general issue. Background knowledge with a basis for reality can affect the specific storyline if it is not done enough, so when writing these plots, authors often take it for granted to add some of their own opinions or issues, rather than writing content that really matches the background knowledge of the game. In this way, everything the player sees, hears, knows and feels in the game seems to need an extra layer (or even more layers) of interpretation derived from modern social knowledge, no matter how trivial these observations and hearings.
I think readers can probably pick out this kind of example from their own game experience that "because the research is not done enough, the player has to use his own modern social life experience to force the understanding", so I would like to pick an example of "the research is really done enough, so that the player can really and realistically substitute into a completely different world from modern life". The game is called Darklands, a PC role-playing game released in 1992. The game does an excellent job of painting a medieval German landscape, with only minor geographical flaws. The theme of Dark Lands is brilliantly presented, and the entire game is at the service of this medieval German style picture, without all the messy nonsense. Probably because of this, it can still win praise from players to this day, and there are still few competitors. Of course, the positive example is not only "Dark Places". Luckily, there are plenty of games that are experimenting with this, such as Expeditions: Conquistador, which has done a great job of doing its homework on the setting and setting.
The most amazing thing about Dark Land is that it includes the lives, days of worship and miracles of more than 100 medieval Christian saints that have occurred in real history. Moreover, this information is integrated into the gameplay
A recreation of real history in Expeditionary Force: The Conqueror: the wrath of justice and the vile infidels
Now that we have not done our homework, let's talk about the second problem we mentioned earlier - the shortcomings of writers in the use of language. Nowadays, many "well-built RPG masterpieces" will write some short, prose paragraphs to fill the game. There's nothing wrong with this in itself, provided you can keep the language flowery while speaking something. It doesn't matter if you use flowery sentences and words, as long as you really know how to use them. If you always modify adverbs with adverbs, or insist on stacking 3 adjectives in front of each noun, that's not good.
This is why I said earlier that you must first understand the specific meaning of each word. If you are very clear about phrases, etymology, meaning, grammar, and style, then your language will naturally become condensed. There is a galloping dog, and the public knows: "Try to write about it." "There are dogs lying on the thoroughfare, and they kill them with horses' hooves." "There is a horse running away on the street, and the lying dog is killed." "Let it repair history, and ten thousand volumes have not yet ended." "What is Neihan Yun?" "Publicity: "Yima kills dogs in the way." "Smile with a smile). But if you're not familiar with any of these things, what you write is bound to be full of anxious and low-level expressions.
Next time you play that kind of game with a lot of text, I suggest you pay attention to the phrases of "adjectives + nouns", and then think about whether these phrases are really meaningful - if they are metaphors, what are the metaphors they bring out; If it's a description, what kind of information they give you. I'm sure there must be a lot of nonsense. They look cool, but when you dig deeper, they don't contain any information at all. The only reason for their existence is probably to expand the length of the text.
I was recently playing Torment: Tides of Numenera. This game is a treasure trove of mentally retarded statements. There was so much in the game that seemed gorgeous but was actually nothing, that I had to pick up a small book and write down some of it, some of which were really... It makes me feel the need to share it with everyone. So let's take a look at the following examples.
The 2017 game has been called "the spiritual sequel to Exotic Souls."
"The air is humid and cold." - But is this air also full of water vapor?
（"The air is humid and dank" - but is the air also watery and wet?）
- The air in "Torture: The Tide of Newmona" seems strange. Sometimes the air is "lifeless and suffocating," and sometimes "heavy and dirty, as if the texture left by maggots crawling over a smooth plane." The latter sentence is a typical empty and meaningless expression. There have been moths in my own kitchen, and I can responsibly tell you that small meat bugs like maggots don't scratch the air and leave any traces. So, what this statement is trying to say, I really don't understand.
Suddenly, a strange noise rings in your shared world, like a bell, if it rots.
（Suddenly, a grotesque noise rings through your shared worlds, like a bell if bells could rot.）
- Think about the last sentence, "If this clock is going to rot", and then think about what this scene is. What exactly does this little sentence express? What effect does the decay of the clock have on the sound? Will the sound be more "quirky"? And then again, the meaning of this "weird" is also quite vague. Will the sound of this bell become more high-pitched? Sinker? Or is it something out of shape, distorted? Or as if it was covered, it became low and muffled? So, what should it look like? So far, I have not mentioned the question of how the clock will rot. Of course, I think it is not completely unacceptable from a rhetorical point of view to say that this clock is "rotten", which probably means that the clock made of metal has become incomplete due to rust. It's just that if you say "this bell is rusty", it sounds very unfeeling, especially without that otherworldly feeling. Just like the aforementioned sentence that describes the air in the world of Newmona, "Something is like X, if X can Y" appears too much.
The particularly spicy sentence is not only this one, but also one: "You feel something... Something weird. It's a smell, if your emotions can be smelled. ”
Standing in front of you is an exhausted traveler. His grim features were largely hidden by the pointed hat he wore on his head. When you look closer, you can see the lines on his face. This line tells you that this is a well-informed person who must have a lot of stories about him.
（In front of you is a weary traveler whose grim visage is mostly obscured by a pointy hat. Upon closer inspection, the lines on his face indicate he has seen much and has many tales to tell.）
——For a person whose "face has been mostly hidden", is this too much detail that can be observed with the eye alone? Exhausted, cold-looking, and the lines on his face give so many hints...
It wears elaborate clothes. This dress makes the towering and slender feather ornament on the top of its head more conspicuous... Its clothes are of great texture and well-cut.
（It wears fine clothes that serve to accentuate the tall, thin crest on its head. […]. Its clothes are finely tailored and well made.）
- Look how hard our author tries to assure you that this imaginative player seems to be able to see it all with his own eyes.
But Torment: The Tide of Newmona isn't the only negative textbook. The pinnacle of this somewhat ill empty passage is still from our old friend, "this is even more heavyweight" "Tyrant".
Take a look at this text in the game:
The blue wind blows through your body. Your skin feels a slight tingling, as if it has been poked by the sharp corners of a triangular object.
Lantry laughed softly. The heartfelt laughter sounded green, as tough as leather, and with a hint of musty smell.
Your fingers itch a little, as if you have tasted salt and rust. It's savoring the air like it has 10 tongues. You place your palms in the shape of a cup on your forehead, and your fingers are immediately deafened by the smell in your voice. The smell seems to penetrate the muscles in your palm and reach your marrow.
After a few seconds, the feeling disappeared.
The original text of the above paragraph
To improve the reading experience, this is an enlarged version of the image above
Regardless of the grammatical and typographical errors in the previous passage (such as "a salty, rusty flavors", "flavor" is a countable noun, here the singular and plural are wrong) - after all, these are still minor problems - let's first take a look at what this passage is trying to say. Obviously, this paragraph is intended to describe the phenomenon of "synesthesia", that is, there are multiple different sensations being felt at the same time, through some less unusual way. The problem with this paragraph is that the author does not understand what he is trying to express at all, so he directly steps on the watermelon skin and slides to where it counts, stuffing all kinds of plausible imagery that flashes in his mind.
In this segment, the player character first feels the color (i.e., the blue wind) through touch, and then suddenly, hears the laughter of green. The description of the finger is equally unclear. Fingers first taste, then hear, and finally even smell – that is, they can taste the colors that were originally mentioned, carried in the air. The whole paragraph has no continuity, no meaningful content, no idea what to say. In fact, the imagery mentioned in this paragraph can be done for some articles. The word "blue" for blue can be used to refer to "cold", which can then be combined with the tingling felt on the skin behind, because this slight stinging can be interpreted as goosebumps due to the cold.
A bigger problem we can find from the above examples is that when you try to cram more complex words into a paragraph or try to mix more imagery, it becomes more difficult to maintain consistency and consistency. And these two points, in my opinion, best reflect the quality of a piece of text. The so-called consistency of style and content refers to the inherent consistency and coherence of paragraphs at both macro and micro levels. The content of a paragraph from point A to point B and all the way to point Z must be logical, that is, the content is coherent. The consistency of writing style means that at different points in the paragraph, such as points A, D, L and Z, the style of words and sentences, the tendency and frequency of related words, and the feeling brought to the reader by rhetorical devices should be similar.
However, it is not easy to do this, and a little inattention in the process of conceiving a passage may cause this sense of harmony and coherence to be broken. For example, sometimes the author suddenly opens his brain and thinks of some expressions that he feels are quite beautiful and witty - this expression may be really good if it is only placed at a specific point in the passage and taken out by the reader to look at it alone. But when it is put together with other points and included in the overall text and read, the sense of violation is very strong. This kind of writing technique was used a lot in the writing of popular novels in the early years, mainly to take care of the audience and distribution characteristics of popular novels - people read these novels as a pleasure, they may read them repeatedly, but they never seriously put into thinking. Therefore, some places that are not surprising and dead are easy to remember.
(Translation: The word "pulp writing" is used in the original text, which refers to the writing of popular fiction, that is, "pulp fiction".) "Pulp Fiction" was used by director Quentin Tarantino as the title of his film, which is translated into Chinese as Pulp Fiction. In fact, this type of novel is not necessarily vulgar, but they are clearly aimed at the general audience, mainly to portray the story of a specific protagonist to carry out various adventures, and the reader is just a good picture to read. In fact, "pulp fiction" also gave birth to many well-known fictional characters, including Zorro, Gordon the Flying Man, Buck Rogers, Conan the Barbarian King and Tarzan the Ape. Moreover, many well-known authors have published their works in magazines dedicated to "pulp fiction", including Arthur Clark, O. Henry, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald, Asimov, Edgar Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and Lovecraft. In fact, these writers are also well-known popular fiction writers, and they are all known for "storytelling". ）
The most classic example of this is Wasteland 2. Some people may say that the overall emotional tone of the game "Wasteland 2" is a bit crazy, revealing crazy energy, so is it a bit problematic to seek coherence and consistency in such a game. However, I don't think so. Against a background of absurdity in every way, maintaining consistency in form and connotation, while also making the text interesting – rather than making yourself a fool for the sake of crazy feelings – is when it really comes to work. The main reason why the text quality of "Wasteland 2" is as high and low as a sinusoid, probably because their writing team is too many, and different paragraphs are written by different people, so the consistency is very poor. But even so, it is still too nonsense to be inconsistent in the same paragraph.
Let's take the example of Titan Canyon. There, the player will defuse a huge nuclear bomb and return to the monks' settlement, only to find that the act of defusing the nuclear bomb has indeed thrown the monks into chaos. At this point, the player has to talk to Father Enola. In the previous dialogue, Enora behaved like a typical cult leader, and his speech style was obviously more "erratic" than others. So when you finally defused the nuclear bomb, destroyed the spiritual pillar of the order under him, and plunged the order into chaos, what was the last sentence that the sect leader who had previously seemed very majestic said to you, what was the last sentence that resembled the last judgment?
"You're so bad!"
（"You suck!" ）
So...... Where are the big fireworks? Where is the rain of fire from heaven? Where is the vicious curse that solemnly proclaimed sent you to eighteen levels of hell? Where is the fanaticism and anger after the altar was overturned?
Yes, he is him, the young hero Nezha!
Of course, there is no way to eliminate this nonsense or inconsistency – as long as there is a good enough editor. I'm talking about "real" editors, those who have experience, ability, and are worthy of their salaries, not the writers who gather together and pretend to say something painless, which is called "peer review", nor call the people in charge of quality inspection and quality control and let them check the passage for typos.
The problem is that the art of editing seems to have long been lost, or it has never entered modern game development. We can only speculate why this text-oriented game does not have an editor-in-chief to rule the whole situation - perhaps the writers are as self-esteemed as the chief female singer and cannot accept criticism from others; It may be that the amount of text in the game is too much work for a single editor-in-chief, and if you invite a few more people, the development cost cannot be stopped; Of course, it may also be that there has been a lack of attention, resulting in the fact that there is no such candidate in the market.
Before I get into the next topic, I must say that my criticism is aimed at developers who also value text writing and hope to bring better text to players. I'm not targeting developers who don't have the ability or commitment to text. These developers may not have a brilliant plot or a fascinating level of text, but I still have a lot of respect for them, because many of these developers really focus on building gameplay. Not all games have to have a subtle story or sultry text, even those who want to do a subtle story or sultry text, but I don't despise the powerless developers. What I despise is those who make things that are not good, and who feel good about themselves, who pretend to be another Tolkien developer. That's all.
(To be continued)
This article was compiled from: rpgcodex.net
原文标题：RPG Codex Editorial: Darth Roxor on the State of RPG Writing
Originally written by Darth Roxor