Improve Game Writing in Six Easy Steps!

Look, I love a good swear, me. Sometimes, bellowing the “F” word is the only thing that cuts it. That said, the notion that video games are adolescent wank fantasies doesn't disappear with a “Strong Language” warning – if anything, it only reinforces that opinion.
Much like children, many games seem to gleefully exploit their discovery of rude words by shouting them at every opportunity, completely diminishing their impact. Whilst The Darkness 2 was some supremely enjoyable silliness, swears bounced off the wall more often than bullets, and by the end of the game, the word 'fuck' lost all impact, becoming offensive not via its context, but its tiresome overuse.
Yet this is far from the worst offender. Kane and Lynch, Hitman Absolution, Saint's Row 3... all deluded enough to think that effective swearing means shouting 'fuck' again and again.
Excessive swearing is pitiful enough that it should only ever exist as a form of cheap humour. For some effective examples check out either the entirety of House of the Dead: Overkill, or this audio taken from the charming Metal Arms: Glitch in the System...



In other words; swearing is at once crude, and effective. So use it appropriately, shithead.







Possibly one of the lamest attempts to inject excitement into otherwise pedestrian game scripts, twist endings – of which betrayal is a recurring theme – are more often than not recycled from the end of every Scooby Doo episode ever broadcast. Unfortunately, most instances in which a character turns out to be evil occur in games that fail entirely to liken us to their cast, resulting in an indifferent shrug. Mirror's Edge, for example, makes a villain out of the one and only person it could possibly be, and I'm damned if I can even remember her name without a Wikipedia search.

Even earnest attempts at plot twists fall way, way short of expectations. Take Bionic Commando, a game in which your robot arm is actually your wife. Yep.

The best plot twists are the ones that change the way we look at the game. Let's take an aforementioned example in Bioshock, and also Spec Ops: The Line; two plot twists that not only make startling character revelations, but also make the player question everything they've done to that point - the latter also managing to make a poignant commentary on the one-sided nature of war games, being as it is a third-person shooter that questions the morality of its own genre.
Essentially, developers, if the twist affects anybody but the player, make damn sure it affects a character they care about. Speaking of which...








Dom Santiago really likes his wife; in fact, it should have been the marketing tagline for Gears of War 2. Yet by the time we discover her fate (spoiler - it's not good) it's impossible to feel what he feels as, right up until that point, the closest we've had to a believable interaction with her is a cutscene, in which she brings us breakfast in bed.
Now, I love breakfast in bed, but not enough to become emotionally attached to the character equivalent of a legally-bound Weetabix servant. Especially if I'm going to shoot more aliens in the face within two minutes of her death.

There's a difference between writing passionately and writing insistently. Gears of War 2 insists that Dom's wife is worth fighting for and does little outside of the superficial to convince us of this. It's impossible to care for Maria as we know nothing about her.
There's a bizarre tendency within video games to romanticise loving relationships – which sounds like a bizarre complaint, I know. But relationships are rarely as perfect as that. They're tumultuous. They require compromise and sacrifice. Smother our leading couple in kisses, poetry and love letters and they resemble little more than caricatures. It's part of what makes the romantic subplot in both The Darkness games effective; we're asked to share some of the most mundane or depressing moments in Jackie and Jenny's life, and reminded that sometimes, couples must share their bleaker moments.

It needn't always be romantic. One of the most excellent examples of a character actually worth a damn is none other than The Walking Dead's Clementine. We grow to love her via the time we spend with her, and our final moments with her are heartbreaking. Not because the game tasks us with protecting her, nor because the game is even about her – but simply because, silently, it allowed us to care for her.






My favourite protagonist of 2013 was Luigi from Luigi's Mansion 2. No word of a lie, I think he's utterly adorable. He's actually far braver than portrayed, daring to confront all of his fears, albeit reluctantly. He's capable in player hands, yet stumbles over every possible interaction with slapstick perfection. Best of all, he conveys so much emotion without uttering anything resembling a full sentence.
All of which makes him a far more likeable protagonist than the last Prince of Persia, Alan Wake, Resident Evil 6's Chris Redfield, Adam Jensen, Kratos, Frank West, Raiden, the old Lara Croft, Sam Gideon and practically every main character from every JRPG of the past generation.
In player hands, these characters are meant to be, or at least to feel, unstoppable. But their brooding whines or bad-ass attitudes do little to make them endearing.
Let's pick on Adam Jensen for a bit, as despite my adoration for the Deus Ex franchise he's a colossal shit-biscuit. Considering that he's constantly bitching about his cybernetic implants he's pretty intent on using them for anti-social purposes. Be it stabbing people from behind or punching through walls just because he can, he's a spoilt child with a weirdly polygonal beard. Worst of all, being forced to play as him fractures the immersion of a first-person, choice-driven RPG, and takes the fun out of those instances where the player decides it's their turn to be the arsehole. Stop hogging all the douchebaggery, Jensen!
To have to play as these supercilious tossers for the duration of the game is testing in and of itself, but for developers to think that these are the characters we aspire to be once again drags us kicking and screaming into that adolescent wank-fantasy we should probably avoid now and then.





Hollywood actors do not elevate a separate media. More polygons do not equal more emotion. It takes more than a storyline in common for two characters to fall in love. Sex scenes in video games do not work and, come to think of it, the ones you conceive are frequently awkward and gruesome.
I respect that Cage has his admirers, but to claim that he wants to progress the medium strikes me as insincere when each step he takes towards this seems to actually drag games further and further towards cinema.
Cage's problem is that his amateurish screenplays would be laughed out of Hollywood, and whilst gaming storytelling finds its feet, the lowered standards of their storylines are the perfect outlet for his strained works.
There is an outlet for your work, David. It's called “Straight to DVD” and it did wonders for Marley and Me: The Puppy Dog Years.