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[William Broom]

No troll, just a stupid joke, that I later decided to turn into a point when Paul charged past and accused me of having presumptuous literary standards, which is obviously absurd (though maybe that's fair play after I gave such a dickish list, I dunno). I mean, my real list of games-with-good-stories is way longer, but I think those games all have pretty interesting storytelling techniques.  Mr Do vs Unicorns' story, for example, is all told in the stupid title - it's totally a mystery why this clown hates unicorns so much.  The gameplay not only doesn't say why, it just makes it weirder - apparently the unicorns are minions of Satan or something.  It's an interesting example of the kinds of interesting stories that can be created when you totally don't give a shit about story.  Kirby's Dreamland 3's story is really a bunch of stories in the form of puzzles in each level - I sort of found them sort of moving.  I honestly think Wario Ware microgames have great stories too.  They are kind of like crazy little poems, though the crying dog one probably isn't actually my favourite.  So I was being half serious.  Sorry.

That's fair enough, and I do agree that Warioware stories are good in their own way (haven't played the other ones you mentioned).

I just found it a bit weird that you previously said that you only found 5 game stories to be enjoyable, but the 5 examples you gave didn't really show high standards for storytelling. Like, the ambiguous non-story of Mr. Do does not sound like it's unique, there's probably a wide range of other games which tell their stories in a similar way.

[Draknek]

Another reading text game: http://www.molleindustria.org/ergon_logos/ergon_logos.html
(From EGP)

[Triplefox]

I have a few thoughts on this subject.

I think the quantity of dialogue and its context are the most important factors. A certain subset of players will actively try to ignore dialogue until you can demonstrate otherwise that it's worthwhile to pay attention. For these moody, red-faced, hyperactive players, the only goal is to "beat the game" and that means speeding through everything as fast as possible. So before you can do anything else with the text of your story you have to win them over; they're your toughest audience.

This means that you should work hard to reinforce everything crucial to the story via multiple elements and build in a real relationship between all aspects of the game. I advocate short and snappy dialogue for most games because it supports the interests of the hyper-players, but more importantly, I think you absolutely can't just dump dialogue into a game and use that as the only source of story context.

Game writing's presentation tends to be a split between boxes of text, perhaps with a throwaway portrait, spoken dialog/voiceovers and messages played/shown during gameplay, and full on movies. I have problems with the text boxes and the movies: text doesn't mesh well with the highly visual environments of most games, and movies are just plain too expensive and time-consuming to do well. Spoken with jawflap seems to work decently well during gameplay, as do short in-game messages. But they fall short for anything decently lengthy.

That leads me to consider alternatives to the plain text box - text with other presentation methods. I think the best medium to draw from for text box alternatives is comic books: if you want to stop the game to show text, show a nice, big, impressive character portrait to go with it. Have them do something. Add some special effects on top. It doesn't have to be animated, just dynamically posed. A dynamic picture invites the player to ask "why is the character doing that?" That is a mystery that adds weight to the text and make it more important, and that will induce players to read, no matter what you've written.

Showing character actions alongside their dialog is a huge part of Phoenix Wright's presentation, though since they had a budget, they went all the way and fully animated it.

Styling text, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, can be effective, but the things you can do with that seem pretty limited, overall. You can control pacing through the speed of text display, but you can't represent the other nuances of voice other than with melodramatic OVEREMPHASIS methods. Every little bit counts though.

Allowing dialogue to be skipped should also be mentioned as a double-edged sword; it's a valid complaint that including lengthy unskippable sequences is annoying, but the hyper-player will be encouraged by such features to skip crucial dialog and subsequently set themselves up to get stuck and frustrated later. So I would advocate "less text" before "text you can blast through."

But the main point I had going into this ramble is that the only reason we've standardized on square text boxes and tiny portraits is because old games had to use them to fit resource limitations. We should avoid them unless we're intentionally going for that look. It's much more appealing to think "graphic design" for these elements and really push how far you can go with just text, static images, and effects.

[Montoli]

A certain subset of players will actively try to ignore dialogue until you can demonstrate otherwise that it's worthwhile to pay attention. For these moody, red-faced, hyperactive players, the only goal is to "beat the game" and that means speeding through everything as fast as possible. So before you can do anything else with the text of your story you have to win them over; they're your toughest audience.

To be fair, plenty of them don't see it as worthwhile to pay attention because they simply aren't enjoying the game's story.  (Rather than because they don't care about any stories.)  They have the goal "get as much fun out of the game as possible", and they simply skip the text because they're trying to enjoy the other parts of the game, having determined that they think the story sucks.  (either as a whole, or the part that they are currently in)  As has been mentioned numerous times, many games do have pretty crappy stories.

While I personally play games as a compulsive "I must read every scrap of text the designers put in" kind of search, I have plenty of friends who I'll watch playing games, and they'll be like "yeah, yeah, [skip skip skip] you don't trust the princess, and I'm supposed to suspect her instead of the obviously evil chancellor, whatever, can we please get on with the game?"

Re: text effects, if you haven't played any of Paper Mario:  The thousand year door, then I REALLY recommend having a look at it.  The text boxes are round, and shaped like speech bubbles.  The text has all sorts of crazy effects on it that are both eye-catching, and convey meaning more succinctly than anything else I could think of.  I agree, that sort of presentation difference goes a long way towards increasing the impact of text.

[sqrrl]

personally, I think we should try to remove as much text as possible. instead, have the characters more emotive, after all, actions are stronger than words.

[Luke]

Referring directly to the initial poster, I'd like to know the genre of the game. Really, we can't make a good answer that covers every context.

I've just played last MolleIndustria effort and I'm pleased with the result.
It's quick and action-driven, so it's kind of a weird experience, because hypertext fiction is generally so much different.
Spicing some action in dialogs and texts could be a good idea to incourage players to not skip it after two seconds, obviously where more action is desired.

In many games the act of reading is a low-tempo moment in contrast to combat (for example) that is high-tempo. I use to borrow terminology from music, just to define how pacing works.
You know, to make an action sequence highlight, you have to let the player experience a relaxed one.

We have also to make a distinction between text and dialog, and concentrate on the former.
Dialogs have received so much more attection in recent years (I know several methods to make it interesting), but maybe I'm wrong; then it depends on what the poster wanted..

Said that, I'd like to approach the original question as follows: how can we improve the moments of exposition in games?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

A certain subset of players will actively try to ignore dialogue until you can demonstrate otherwise that it's worthwhile to pay attention. For these moody, red-faced, hyperactive players, the only goal is to "beat the game" and that means speeding through everything as fast as possible. So before you can do anything else with the text of your story you have to win them over; they're your toughest audience.

To be fair, plenty of them don't see it as worthwhile to pay attention because they simply aren't enjoying the game's story.  (Rather than because they don't care about any stories.)  They have the goal "get as much fun out of the game as possible", and they simply skip the text because they're trying to enjoy the other parts of the game, having determined that they think the story sucks.  (either as a whole, or the part that they are currently in)  As has been mentioned numerous times, many games do have pretty crappy stories.

While I personally play games as a compulsive "I must read every scrap of text the designers put in" kind of search, I have plenty of friends who I'll watch playing games, and they'll be like "yeah, yeah, [skip skip skip] you don't trust the princess, and I'm supposed to suspect her instead of the obviously evil chancellor, whatever, can we please get on with the game?"

i think triplefox's point was that such behavior is *consistent*. there are some people who consistently skip text in every game they play, and others who consistently don't (as you yourself mentioned). it doesn't matter how good the story is, it's more a function of the player than of the story quality. it's not as if bad stories get skipped more than good stories, it's more that long stories get skipped, no matter what their quality is. no matter how hard you try, no matter how good your story is, there will be people who skip text when they see it, that's just how many people are.

so again i don't really think this is a problem. if you like games with stories, make games with good stories for those who enjoy the stories of games. if you don't, don't. there aren't many people who enjoy stories of games who skip text regularly, it's mostly either people who read the stories regardless of how bad they are, and people who don't read them regardless of how good they are.

this is one of the principles i wrote in the game design philosophy bullet point thread, i think it applies here very strongly: serve people who like your games, not those who don't like them -- i.e. don't try to adjust the game according to the suggestions of people who already don't like it, instead adjust it so that those who already do like it will like it better. better to make 10% of people very happy with a game than to make 90% of people like it okay.

i feel this thread is trying to do the opposite: to cater text to people who don't enjoy text. which is not going to work at all. cater text to the people who already enjoy text.

which isn't to say that you should stick to conventions (the way shmups always stick to the conventions of shmup fans), just that you should innovate in the direction of the people who already enjoy the game or that type of game, not the opposite direction. in other words, make strategy games innovative in a way that strategy game fans enjoy, don't try to remove the things strategy gamers enjoy in order to make a game appeal to people who hate strategy games.

[Montoli]

i think triplefox's point was that such behavior is *consistent*. there are some people who consistently skip text in every game they play, and others who consistently don't (as you yourself mentioned). it doesn't matter how good the story is, it's more a function of the player than of the story quality. it's not as if bad stories get skipped more than good stories, it's more that long stories get skipped, no matter what their quality is. no matter how hard you try, no matter how good your story is, there will be people who skip text when they see it, that's just how many people are.

Right, but my point was "you can't lump together all people who skip stories, there are at least two (and probably more) different motivations that leads to this behavior".  One of these motivations, "just doesn't like reading stories in games" is more or less a lost cause.  It's going to be very difficult to get them to care.  But the other, "has decided the story sucks, and is skipping it because they're not getting enough enjoyment out of reading it" is more or less exactly what this thread appears to be trying to address. 

I agree wholeheartedly that you shouldn't break your game for the people that love it, in hopes of reaching the people you don't.  (See:  Prince of Persia:  Warrior Within)  But it IS usually worth examining the motivation of the people who don't like your game, because it's not always a zero-sum situation.  Sometimes there are ways to bring in new people without alienating the existing ones.  Heck, sometimes you're even fixing things that the existing players wanted fixed, but just didn't hate enough to stop playing over.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i think most of the methods proposed would alienate people who like text in games, though. i mean, if every few words was color-coded, and words popped out and wiggled around like in paper mario or giant letters appeared with voice acting like in phoenix wright, it'd be annoying to many of those who can read paragraphs of text without ADD setting in.

for instance, look at this quote from the first post: "pheonix wright is only game that i can think of that i actually made an effort to read and its a heavy text story driven game"

if phoenix wright is the only text-heavy game someone has ever made an effort to read, the problem is probably more in the person than in the game. i have the suspicion that there's a correlation between those that read for pleasure and those that don't skip text in games. pretty much all the people i know who skip text when they're playing games don't read for pleasure, and all the people i know who don't skip text in games do read for pleasure

[Loren Schmidt]

i think most of the methods proposed would alienate people who like text in games, though. i mean, if every few words was color-coded, and words popped out and wiggled around like in paper mario or giant letters appeared with voice acting like in phoenix wright, it'd be annoying to many of those who can read paragraphs of text without ADD setting in.

Yes, I think that sort of approach really only works in stylized, exaggerated games like those you mentioned. That said, I think those tools are great in the right context.

I tend to agree with the idea that a wall of text is a wall of text. While it can (and should) be well written and presented well, it's always going to be a hard sell with many players. But even though ultimately quality text heavy games don't reach as many people, they should still be made. Sometimes games need to be a certain way.

There's also an interesting middle ground- well written games that have very little text. I think in these cases a much larger number of non-readers end up enjoying the text (because it's not as invasive). At the same time, provided the text is well written, it can be quite pleasing to people who are more inclined to pay attention to writing in a game.

[Montoli]

Re:  Paul Eres's comments

The methods proposed may or may not alienate people who like text in games, but really, that's what this thread is for, right?  Proposing ideas that will make reading text more appealing to some people, and trying to minimize the people it alienates?

Just to throw a pair of datapoints out, while I fit your model [voracious reader, don't usually skip text] a good friend of mine doesn't.  [reads almost as much as I do, and is the one who skips text when he feels the story isn't worth his time investment].

Sure any of these will get obnoxious if overused.  Used with more moderation, and they just heighten effect, as opposed to overwhelming.  You might as well attack bold text, or italic.  As anyone who has ever read comics can attest, text can convey whole extra levels of meaning when the artist is free to draw it in a nonstandard way, in order to highlight some nonstandard aspect of it.  Colored or wiggly text is just the logical evolution of that.

Also, I might be reading too much into it, but your first paragraph reads a tad on the dismissive side, if read with a charitable interpretation.  (and a bit on the insulting side, if not) It is also undermined slightly by the fact that you obviously liked the text in the final fantasy games, (via previous posts in this very thread) and it WAS color coded for your convenience.

I am curious though.  Paul - Have you played Paper Mario?  I'm just wondering if your reaction is based on a general dislike of the idea in the abstract, or actual first-hand experience disliking of the style?

-Montoli, ever charitable

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it was dismissive in a sense -- i'm dismissing the idea that game developers who make games with text should try to dumb them down so to speak for people who skip text, since those people aren't the audience of those games anyway. i think it's a lost cause to try create text-heavy games that those who normally skip text will like.

and i don't think final fantasy color-codes text very often -- you (or someone?) posted some screenshots of a few occurances of that earlier on in the thread, but that isn't the dominant use of text in those games, most of the time it's just plain dialogue without any highlights. also i think the highlights are usually just used for emphasis rather than to make the text easier to read.

i've played paper mario a while back, the n64 one. i liked the medals system it had, and the battle system in general. i didn't play the sequels though (there were a few paper mario games made after it). i think it's a good game, albeit with a bit of an inane story (but it's a mario game). it had a nice story in its own right though, the final battle where the princess saves mario was nicely done. overall though i preferred the story of super mario rpg, which felt more serious and less like a comedy (and was presented more traditionally).

[John Nesky]

I think I must have a higher threshold for how good a story has to be for me to want to read it. I do enjoy reading fiction novels, but only really good ones. The stories in the vast majority of video games, including text-heavy ones, do not meet my subjective quality threshold, so I want to skip those to get to the part of the game that isn't bad. Rare counter examples include Second Sight, Eternal Darkness, Killer 7, and the MGS series, where the stories are actually better than the games. Those are games where I actually would prefer to skip the gameplay parts to get to the story parts.

[JasonPickering]

interesting topics. so I had this idea. basically the game is a platformer, and as you go through the journal of the main character is read. I figure it would help immerse the player and also be a good system of pushing them in the right direction. Does this seem like it would continue to push the player? I know I am not the greatest writer, and I am aiming for a more pulp feel. any thoughts. I am almost afraid that the player will just be annoyed by all the writing in their way.

[resistor]

Personally, I'm a very story-motivated game player.  I play games because I want to find out what happens, not because I want a challenge or something.

That said, I will skim through over-written or wall-of-text style textboxes.  Yes, I care what happens, but if your text bores me too much, is too longwinded, or is simply too hard to read, well, I don't care that much.

Game are like movies in this respect.  Even movie-goers who like elaborate plotlines don't love long, monotone monologues.  Break up the text, mix it with actions, emotions, delivery effects.  Don't overwrite, either for dialogue or description.

[Montoli]

interesting topics. so I had this idea. basically the game is a platformer, and as you go through the journal of the main character is read. I figure it would help immerse the player and also be a good system of pushing them in the right direction. Does this seem like it would continue to push the player? I know I am not the greatest writer, and I am aiming for a more pulp feel. any thoughts. I am almost afraid that the player will just be annoyed by all the writing in their way.

While slightly different, the plot for Eternal Darkness (GameCube) was actually fairly close to what you describe.

It was also a game that almost everyone I know (even the text intolerant ones) read as much of the journal as they could, because it was generally pretty awesome, and added a lot to the game's atmosphere.  So yeah!  I think that structure definitely can be carried off well!

[Kingel]

I'm also one of those who enjoy reading, but usually skim through or skip dialogue in games.

I agree that brevity is a good thing. Not necessarily as a way to cater to the hyperactive, but to make sentences flow better. It might also force the writer to use a wider vocabulary (picking random words out of a thesaurus doesn't count).

The reader's brain will process novel metaphoric expressions differently (longer processing time, larger part of the brain utilized, etc.). If you want the writing to be memorable, there's plenty of neuroscience suggesting that clichés make less of an impact, not to mention writing advice. It could be argued that because speech is simpler, it would be more realistic to write dialogue using familiar expressions, but if the dialogue lacks novely, it relies heavily on content for interest.

interesting topics. so I had this idea. basically the game is a platformer, and as you go through the journal of the main character is read. I figure it would help immerse the player and also be a good system of pushing them in the right direction. Does this seem like it would continue to push the player? I know I am not the greatest writer, and I am aiming for a more pulp feel. any thoughts. I am almost afraid that the player will just be annoyed by all the writing in their way.

My suggestion, if it's a fairly fast-paced game otherwise, would be very brief entries displayed in a way that doesn't interfere much with gameplay. Something that would allow those who were interested in reading to stop and read and others to keep playing. It could be done by allowing the player to move around while reading, and displaying the text far enough up to stay out of the way, so that it won't break the pacing of your game by trapping the player until he's done reading. Even those who didn't initially feel like reading, and would normally skip dialogue windows, might end up reading some of it that way. I don't know how well that would work in practice, however.

[JasonPickering]

right now I have this. very poorly written prototype.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=49bc906aced4cbc4d956df2962098fcbe04e75f6e8ebb871

I am also reminded of the new splinter cell game where new objectives are written on walls and buildings as oppossed to jusst written on screen. small dialougue this idea might work with.

[soundofsatellites]

interesting topics. so I had this idea. basically the game is a platformer, and as you go through the journal of the main character is read. I figure it would help immerse the player and also be a good system of pushing them in the right direction. Does this seem like it would continue to push the player? I know I am not the greatest writer, and I am aiming for a more pulp feel. any thoughts. I am almost afraid that the player will just be annoyed by all the writing in their way.

haha! actually I was trying to implement something like this in a plataformer, but not in the form of a detailed journal. I was thinking putting here and there small phrases, thoughts, that hint both some kind of narrative, and the character persona; so instead of reading what a sign says, you would be reading the "character's thoughts on reading the sign". Your prototype is a good example, but I'm worring how obtrusive the reading is. Maybe making a text bar like roguelikes? I know Night of the Cephalopods had a great narrative system, but worked so well because it was spoken and not written (thus not causing the player to divide his/her attention)... Now I'm rambling... 

INSTANT EDIT: Actually arachne's post is spot on. Don't know how I missed it!

[tim_the_tam]

Referring directly to the initial poster, I'd like to know the genre of the game. Really, we can't make a good answer that covers every context.

ok.. i was referring to any game genre but if you really want a specific genre then rgps especially jrpgs that use a lot of text to tell story.