He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog.
I've seen quite a few streamers that click through the text and don't care about the story.
It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is that a game was playtested within an inch of its life.
Someone ended up optimizing for the kind of player who doesn't care much, because the playtesters didn't care much - they were only there for a paycheck.
But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text while retaining all the information.
I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough.
Game text is highly patterned. And since gamers generally can't be trusted to read long text, it's easy to extract the actually important parts, by design, if you practice it a lot.
It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a reasonable chance of picking out the one log message that stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact the logs are highly patterned.
Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall through the deck-plating and into space there.
I'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue is gone whenever it pops up.
> There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring
I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
Fortunately, these days it seems more common that games highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so you at least get the important keywords.
I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay.
A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story.
Game writers need to learn about character development.
I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”
Funny you mentioned Disco Elysium. I played the game when it was first released and had no audio dialogue. I read moderately fast, but I never skipped any dialogue and always explored all branches my skills allowed. It took me 40 hours to finish.
When audio dialogue was released I played it again and I couldn't stand the slower pace. It'd have probably taken 150h to finish the game again like that. So I switched to another language that was text only. (Btw, having a hotkey to switch between languages on the fly is AMAZING design).
All I'm saying is I'm agreeing with GP, going fast didn't mean I didn't care, quite the opposite as going faster meant I could explore more options.
Most of the time I wish games had an option to auto-skip everything that’s skippable (and just about everything that isn’t gameplay should be skippable).
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.
Visual novels usually present an autoplay feature[1] which stops at choices, or just skips text you haven't met yet. The genre is famous for its multiple endings, even in the dozens, so a game can branch a lot and players re-play a game many times, so the autoplay feature is appreciated.
You can also set the text speed in many games, and there's a play log called history[2] if you missed something.
I've also wanted the reverse option. I tend to want to play the story first and foremost and get deep into that, but the gameplay keeps getting in my way. I still think a lot more gameplay content should be skippable, especially in games that work so hard to tell a deep story.
LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.
Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.
It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.
(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)
> while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that the game’s style was “a little too much ‘ADHD’ for me. I look at those games and it’s like, wow, I feel like I’m playing a slot machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and that… it’s a little too much.”
Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.
Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.
For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
Disco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still possible to do something amazing in the genre.
I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
>While Gilbert said he’s always harbored these kinds of anti-capitalist feelings “at some level,” he said that “certainly recent events and recent things have gotten me more and more jumping on the ‘Eat the Rich’ bandwagon.” Though he didn’t detail which “recent events” drove that realization, he did say that “billionaires and all this stuff… I think are just causing more harm than good.”
This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet there is a very large difference between his wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between himself and Bezos, for example, is waaay higher than between a poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the latter. But where is the more important disparity? It's between a poor person and himself.
He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not the degree of difference is what matters.
[0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M. That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.
I think it’s a pretty simple cutoff. If you’re so rich that you can rent an entire city for your wedding, that’s too rich. If you can buy an entire Hawaiian island, that’s too rich.
You can be a beneficiary of a system and still complain about that system.
On top of that, billionaires who take over media companies and lobby politicians have much more power than a millionaire like Ron. Their ability to make things worse is on a completely different level.
Readit News
Then I read the article :)
It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is that a game was playtested within an inch of its life.
Someone ended up optimizing for the kind of player who doesn't care much, because the playtesters didn't care much - they were only there for a paycheck.
But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text while retaining all the information.
I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough.
It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a reasonable chance of picking out the one log message that stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact the logs are highly patterned.
Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall through the deck-plating and into space there.
I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay.
A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode
Game writers need to learn about character development.
I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”
Maybe you need VA too
When audio dialogue was released I played it again and I couldn't stand the slower pace. It'd have probably taken 150h to finish the game again like that. So I switched to another language that was text only. (Btw, having a hotkey to switch between languages on the fly is AMAZING design).
All I'm saying is I'm agreeing with GP, going fast didn't mean I didn't care, quite the opposite as going faster meant I could explore more options.
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.
[1] https://vndev.wiki/Autoplay [2] https://vndev.wiki/History
LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.
Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.
It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.
(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)
https://grumpygamer.com/
He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.
For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet there is a very large difference between his wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between himself and Bezos, for example, is waaay higher than between a poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the latter. But where is the more important disparity? It's between a poor person and himself.
He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not the degree of difference is what matters.
[0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M. That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.
On top of that, billionaires who take over media companies and lobby politicians have much more power than a millionaire like Ron. Their ability to make things worse is on a completely different level.