Destructoid: BioWare writer's vagina versus the Internet

[binary solo]

Nsanity said:

Destructoid

 

Hepler is a BioWare writer and woke up one day to discover the entire Internet hated her. A number of online communities recently started dogpiling on the lady, accusing her of "ruining" BioWare games with her writing. She's also received a lot of heat for admitting that she doesn't like to play games -- certainly a requirement if your job is to craft narrative (sarcasm). 

By far her greatest "crime" was suggesting that games should let the player skip combat, stating: "Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue."

 

Welllllllll I think these things in particular deserve some attention. Firstly writing story / narrative for games is not the same as writing story for other mediums. Novelists don;t necessarily make good screenwriters, good screenwriters don't necessarily make for good playwrights. And of course the best writers have a passion for the medium in which they write. So if someone doesn't like playing video games one wonders if the only reason such a person is in game writing is because they are not actually good enough writers to write for the medium for which they have a passion. In which case we really don't want them in game writing if there is a general desire among those in the industry and gamers to want to raise the quality of gaming as a story / narrative medium.

Re skipping combat. Well if you did that you'd expose the game writing for the rather poor standard that it has currently...might be a good thing in the long run. But it's about as sensible a suggestion in general as suggesting you should be able to skip through the action scenes in a Terminator movie. Besides, you can just see the dialogue if you want, it's called Youtube, and many of the best games have pretty much every key dialogue / dramatic scene posted on Youtube. I watched pretty much every key scene in all the Legacy of Kain games on Youtube.

What's more, good game developers DO allow you to play all the cut scenes without having to play through the game, or rather without having to play through the game more than once: God of War, Legacy of Kain (Defiance at least), Uncharted 1 and 2, Valkyria Chronicles. Didn't one of the FF games actually more or less do this? You set up your autocombat routine and let it run, so that it was more like an action scene rather than game combat.

I can understand the writer's frustration that they put effort into crafting something good only to have people skip through it. I think the answer to that is the same as the answer to used games: if you make a good product people will value it. So write better and fewer people will chose the skip option.

In the final analysis game writing isn't good enough for people to play games solely for the story, so for the time being at least a "skip the core gaming element" button has no real audience.