Stop making me read
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| Effffffffff this, I am making a sandwich |
I did not become a gamer to read
It is a fairly self explanatory statement, and call me old fashioned, but in my day, gaming was about playing games. But over the past two and a half console generations, the ole literary devices seem to be rooting themselves into the regular rhythmic thumping and button mashing of my favorite obsession.
The earliest offender, in my recollection, is probably one of my favorite game series of all time, Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls. Now being a role playing game, one can mosey amongst the fantastic environs of Morrowind, Cyrodil, and Skyrim collecting many a tome and scroll imparting the knowledge and lore of these rich worlds... but I am just as quick to toss them in the fire or sell them... they take up room in the inventory anyways.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "Dude, it's an RPG, what do you expect." Fair. I could choose to ignore all the books and the lore and the what have you, but it is part of the game mechanic. Your player levels up by reading books about various attributes. But beyond this, what else could Bethesda put into these games, if they were not populating all the books with incredibly lengthy and detailed lore? Perhaps, fixing their terrible animation and pathing system, or I don't know, one of the hundreds of immersion crushing bugs that crop up every time they release a game.
But what about something less RPG-ish and perhaps put out by a major main stream publisher? Take for example Assasins Creed IV: Black Flag, which I recently completed (review forthcoming), which has the audacity to encourage the player to pursue side tasks in the meta world, most of which reward the player with, you guessed it, written lore.
Now maybe it is because I didn't read most of the books I was assigned in school, or for one reason or another reading has always had a negative connotation with me, or perhaps it is because I am a clinically slow reader, but my thirty minutes of side questing is worth more than a character backstory writeup.
So let's jump forward to something more recent, Alien: Isolation. Basic gameplay premise is that you are on a space station where everything has gone sideways and there is an alien hunting you like the last piece of cake at the party. Your passage through the station is accented by the thrills and chills of the sci-fi horror as well as the illuminating pieces of plot provided by the in game characters, audio logs, and emails... or at least the 1979 impression of emails. At least in AI the writing was approaching something that was interesting; I would give it a glance or two, which is saying something, considering at any moment an alien could tail whip me through the spleen, causing a spontaneous jettisoning of the controller from my hands through the nearest window.
But let's be fair. Most in game text, lore, backstory, and what-have-you is written approaching a level that can only be described as creator sanctioned fan fiction. And that is not entirely the writings fault. Gaming, by its very nature, is a visual medium. Everything else you are doing in a video game is about 3,200% more fun and more interesting than reading some block of narrative that will come across as disembodied, unless you have read every other little scrap of cobbled universe building detritus that has floated your way.
How about this game makers, a truce. You will stop loading up the games I love to play (not read) with relatively trite and meaningless fiction and put it in a companion novel. If I like your game enough and want more, I will buy said novel, scouts honor(full disclosure I quit after my first year of Boy Scouts). From where I am doing mental math, that means you can get two sales out of me, just make a good game first!
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