Don't Run into the Woods
onwriting.games
onwriting.games
that really annoys me
and detracts from the message.
if you’re going to ignore the rules
the payoff needs to be worth it
otherwise you’re just being…
self-indulgent?
... he writes ... into the void
From what I gather reading the footer of the web page they are a trained writer. Like they have potentially a degree in the English language from a school.
What are you getting at with your pile on criticism? Tell us what you really think...
About what is acceptable,
about what your expectations are,
about effectiveness of eliciting and guiding emotional expression.
It is telling to be that this thread of commenters is focused on criticizing the style, here. That's kind of fascinating to me.
Sometimes style is the message. I don't think this is a good example of that, as the author is trying communicate unrelated concepts. A better way to do that is, "clearly".
What the writing reminds me of is myself, when I was nineteen, in art school. That is not an association you want to have made, as I thought I knew everything when in fact I didn't even know who I was myself. Clever just gets you so far.
Show me that you are confident in your writing, rather than hiding behind a messy style that you so desperately want me to be impressed with.
I agree that for you style is getting in the way of the message.
I don't agree that it's clear from the writing that the author is desperate, or wants to impress you.
Instead I speculate that the author does not care what > you < think: I believe that the author is not writing for "you", at least not the you that is in your current state of mind. I speculate that they are writing for somebody who's in a more freeform kind of word poetry state of mind.
I mean that's the only kind of conclusion I can come up with reading the article because it is clearly non-strunk & white english. So that leads me to think okay this is probably poetry or prose of some kind of whimsical or rhyming form.
And then I reread it and I see the words are closer to a stream of consciousness, as is talked about in other comments here. They're a little bit more structured than a stream of consciousness, in my view because the words appear to evoke feelings like notes in music, to a degree.
The overall point of the article, as it appears to be overtly stated in the footer, to help writers to be effective at writing for video games. And this post specifically is about pulling emotions from the writer into the video game that are appropriate to the meandering experience of a player.
So I liken the presentation here to be less conventional technical structured writing and more a song or a tune. And that's how I find this article useful.
Making an outline is great. But I'm not going to make someone read my notes on something I want to actually write, nor publish my shitty first draft and then have all of us treat it like some exceptional creative product.
This whole, "I'm beyond all that" is kinda navel gazing, narcissistic. If that's what you mean by "writing for oneself" than I guess I agree. I'm not actually convinced this person knows the fundamentals of clear communication or writing.
If what you want to do is teach, teach. If what you want to do is perform, perform.
A few notes on a topic without the in between words.
Works for me.
why not start with a linear narrative?
use all the techniques we already know and feel them in video game form?
have you heard of walking simulators? They're just that, with one or two
twists. Yet...
I'm not saying you should show it to anyone if you're not ready.
Is this a backhanded compliment? Do you think they're being particularly effective because they're trying to evoke crackheads?
I don't think that piece of writing is intended to be a technical treatise on creative writing. Instead, it to me reads as a tool to help technical writers for games to elicit effective story content that has an impact on the player. So I do think their prosaic poetical style intentionally evokes wandering, in order to encourage the reader to mentally wander as a part of their own creative exploration process when writing story content for video games.
Totally true. I downregulated the feedback to be a little more kind.
My experience living in LA may have colored my response.
To address the meat of your response > it to me reads as a tool to help ...
I don't see why this even qualifies as tool. There's no summary, not flow of logic, no conclusion really, just some thing a former mentor used to call a "walk through the garden of thought".
Sure, the thoughts look pretty to you, but you need to cultivate it for your audience, which usually means getting to the point and providing evidence or information clearly. If you cannot do that, at least be engaging, so that the reader sticks with you until you reach your point.
This writing style just doesn't do either of those things. It's confusing to jump from line to line and have to fill in a lot of gaps, it's not easily scanned for relevant points (every line is bolded and separated from text), it just ignores everything we know about presenting information.
I agree with you, given that context. This article is not an effective brief nugget on emotional introspection for videogame writers.
I see it intended to be something different in style. And the fact that I choose to see it differently is the fascinating part to me, than this whole thread here on hacker news. It's like everyone else on this thread is upset and throwing their systematized note cards up in the air due to the article being unoptimized for Google's search engine. It's frankly odd to me, this mob of judgment jumping down the throat of the author.
In my opinion, it's more criticism of the article for not communicating clearly to the reader. I don't care about Google SEO, but I do care about being able to understand the purpose of what I'm reading.
> this mob of judgment jumping down the throat of the author.
I do take issue with this. We are not our work. If we create something that has flaws, it should not be rude or uncouth to address those, nor should it be considered a personal attack on the author. Otherwise, why wouldn't the same apply to the critique itself? Wouldn't it be similarly wrong to jump down the throat of somebody who criticizes the work, as much of this thread boils down to?
Writing is not sacred, and we are not what we write. If we take critique personally, then we are setting ourselves up for defensiveness and an inability to grow or develop.
That said, it's clear that many people like the presentation. The fact that this article isn't for everybody is not a bad thing. Not everything needs to be for everybody, and somebody who points out why it doesn't work for them can be right, while at the same time, those aspects aren't a problem for other readers.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103147...
16. Be clear.
and
When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
I think your examples does a disservice, as your breaks do not follow such rules.
"Writing" is probably supposed to be general-audience presentation of information. By avoiding all rules of presentation, you invalidate everyone's ability to quickly digest the information. I tried to scan this as I usually do, and was forced to read each excruciating, disjointed, malformed line one by one to get to the point.
What a mess.
I agree that this writing style mimics thought. I don't want to read disorganized thoughts, though. It's not a huge issue, because the length of this piece is quite short, but if I were to do several minutes of reading this style of writing, I would find it very exhausting, and I probably wouldn't retain most of it, because the lack of organization inhibits my ability to fully internalize it. Most of my disorganized thoughts that I don't really mull over (ie. thinking the same thoughts repeatedly in different orders, and considering many different aspects of them) or organize into a written form, I also don't retain. I lose them forever. If I was sharing them with somebody else, I don't think I'd keep them in the format that's most easily forgotten.
For personal journaling, it's fine enough, but I don't find it really a compelling write-up of the age-old premise "Don't overthink it, just get started. If you overthink it, you might never finish, or might even never really start." It's not really much different from the famous "Shitty First Drafts" paper[0].
[0]: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
Ouch!
The expectation that your thinking is encyclopedic in its comprehensiveness and structure is a pretty tall standard to live up to in my opinion.
I feel empathy for you.
My thinking is a disorganized mess because that's the nature of thought in the first place. Your thoughts are everything you are experiencing or considering as you experience or consider them. The vast majority of them are gone within moments after you've thought them, to never be remembered again.
The thoughts that stay are the ones that you consider, run over in your head a few times, and have taken the opportunity to organize in your head a bit more. True stream of consciousness is not usually enjoyable to read (and I'll note that this article is not true stream of consciousness, but rather minimally organized thoughts).
To back up for a second and provide context, I was keyed up after reading and really focusing in on the parent commenters criticality, mocking and shaming. I perceived it as a judgmental characterization of the author of this piece of story writing guidance. So when I came across your comment I thought you might be beating up on yourself to echo the emotional sentiment of, and to try and build a bridge between the parent commenter and the article writer. I wanted to provide a counterpoint and some support to you.
Now I guess that my reaction to the article is different, less about a jarring sensation of discordance where I'm expecting you know organized bulletized conventional grammar explaining some subjects, and recognizing instead a person who's trying to help fiction writers to access their feelings. I see the author chose to do this through a tongue in cheek way of writing whimsical prose using little punctuation and lots of white space.
I appreciate your consideration and thoughtfulness. You're not far off in your assessment. I was trying to bridge a gap between the top-level comment and the negative reaction to it by using my own perspective as an example of why the presentation might be difficult for some people. I also don't appreciate the tone of the original criticism, but I did share the same disconnect with the content due to the presentation.
Personally, I feel that people should be able to express themselves however works for them. The article's prose isn't for me, but it really doesn't have to be. On the other hand, I do also feel that there's nothing wrong with others sharing their critiques of written works. I don't like the common sentiment of negative reactions to any and all criticism of anything. We are not our creations, and a criticism of a written work shouldn't be treated as hostile. Again, the mocking tone of the original criticism was distasteful, but not enough so to disregard it entirely (unlike another "crackhead" comment that crosses the line).
See, this is where I differ (potentially from most, given the responses here). I love reading "disorganized" thoughts because they aren't random, they follow the writers train of thought. This gives insight not just into the content of their mind, but the structure! How fun!
This is a blog about marrying creativity and technicality, guiding writers who are creating story content for video games.
In this case the author appears to be attempting to help encourage the reader to be introspective and uncover their own feelings as their play testing in progress video games, as part of the development of story content, in order to facilitate expressing human emotions.
Human emotions are notoriously tricky to express. People can go their whole lives without developing emotional intelligence. I would imagine that effective storytelling about people involves a certain amount of emotional intelligence. This article to me is instruction on training one's own emotional intelligence.
What do you think about that?
Yeah it is strange. I've been thinking about that too, while writing them. I believe that I'm using this opportunity to understand rejecting criticality, as it relates to intention.
To go deeper, I think I frankly am lonely, and also feel pain about the dissonance between the commentary .. talking on this thread about the style of the author and missing the point of the author. That touches me in a sensitive place, related to the loneliness, where in my personal life I sometimes don't feel like I'm being heard in spite of my best efforts. Also some abandonment history. :P
Recently I took a 16personalities.com test and it gave me infp, And you know those tests are just like a slice of inside into you, not the whole picture. But it gave me an opportunity to think about some of the difficulties that I've had throughout my life socializing and how I have adapted to them. Largely around where I have some visionary optimistic idea and the responses a bunch of "poo poo's" from those around me, if you know what I mean? Resulting in me feeling rejection, and throughout my life trying to make sense of why. So it's top of mind.
Does this make sense?
I won't speak to it's merits or problems, but just point out that I didn't find it hard to parse, perhaps because its familliar to me?
So when they write, what they're doing is narrating the images and ideas playing out like a movie in their head. Unfortunately most narration needs pairing with an image to make sense.
I like this articles point that the emotion of the moment is really what matters and the challenge for writers is to identify the emotion that is evoked through the wide smattering of situations a dynamic video game puts its players through.
I think it goes beyond video.
Back to speculating about society and its thinking, we spend a lot of time consuming media packages presented to us on our cell phones or tablets or computers. That's a repetitive process. This sounds like training to me. The mode is a screen or two screens if you've got multiple monitors, some kind of touch or hand-driven browsing device might come out or a touch screen. And yeah, the images can flicker on the screen like a captivating campfire, engorging you in a dazzling array of light and sound which can tickle your funny bone or involve you in a sad moment.
It's like life for all of us media consumers has become predictable, because you can visit and revisit these experiences.
Life of course is not that predictable, it is chaotic and as adults we only learn how to protect against the radically horrible potential outcomes of life through skills and learning from other people's mistakes.
I'm sure the author didn't intend that, it's just that how I read things being deeply incompatible with their style.
I do read some things "the normal way", but that requires either the text being densely packed, or a linear story.
How do you know you are not missing a ton of important meaning? I feel like I know people that do this and are clearly missing major points by substituting their on beliefs in.
> ... you’re going to ignore the rules
Why share a nearly entirely unconstructive critical, mocking, and shaming discussion point in a public forum? To be clear, it's okay by me to do so .. it's just odd to me. It stands out as unhelpful, unexpected, and confusing and so to dig into what's interesting about it, it makes me wonder what's going on for you personally, and so I'm asking about it.
About the article: everybody is different. How people express themselves differs widely. What they are saying however approaches reasonablely concrete shared meaning based on context. In this case there is a writer who is talking about conveying emotion in the challenging medium of video games / interactive entertainment software, overtly for the purpose of being helpful supporting scriptwriters engaged in that field. Through the blog in question, they effectively express a meandering open-minded approach to eliciting one's own thoughts and feelings, as a writer, in whatever genre the game itself ends up being in order to appropriately honor the characters of the game. Their use of white space and lack of punctuation suggests this openness, to me.
You, here, implicitly state that you know or have decided what 'the rules' are for other people who are writing their own missives.
Some provocative thoughts for discussion: Is this criticality really neuroticism? Are your comments reflecting society's recently hot-topic flirtations with authoritarianism? Are your habits influencing this criticality: what are your personal habits towards socialization trending towards, in-person to see people's faces or are you primarily using communication techniques that don't offer you the opportunity today to experience other people's emotions?
There seems to be a lot of similarities between the few criticisms (especially self-indulgence) that this hacker news comment lodges against the author and your own comment. That makes this a fascinating piece of art.
I’ll try to do better in the coming emails.
Cheers!
Even the subject of your post is narrative-driven games, which already also aren't for everybody.
When you're making something special specifically for the people who like that special kind of thing, deviating from that to be more accessible, or achieve a greater audience, or even to be more "effective" can be a path to diluting what you're doing, and spoiling what is special about it.
The criticism and feedback are correct; they are things that kept the words from really working for that reader. They also prevented the post from really working for me. I don't believe, however, that I need to be the audience. If you are doing something different from everybody else, in a unique style, it feels to me that it would be a little sad for that uniqueness to go away, even if I'm not a part of it. Like a species of a bird that I have never seen and never will see going extinct is still a sad thing.
I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just saying that criticism can be right, correct, and valid, and the right thing to do can still sometimes be to not take the advice, even when it's factually correct.
I do appreciate though that this is written for a prospective author thinking of making the leap to writing for video games. They'd probably be interested more in the creation of narrative games. But maybe its worth considering how what I mentioned before can contribute to a narrative. An example that comes to mind is how in some simple games, items have a description that has some lore or a little joke. It reinforces the already existing player desire to explore and discover items, and makes it fun to see what each new one says. The key point here is that the descriptions don't even have to be good for this to work
In my head, the plot of the game is the imagined story of my guy. The cutscenes and whatnot, that’s just somebody else’s fanfic about my guy, a much better character that exists in my head.
Environmental storytelling can be pretty good, though. The FromSoft games did a great job of setting up environments that evoke the feeling of a type of world, you fill in the blanks, despite having basically incoherent actual plots.
It is unrealistic writing, but the game is fun.
Honestly, if you took my favorite games and stripped them of their stories, they would be mediocre games at best. Yet they tell stories which I can not find in any book.
FFXIV: A MMO with sub-par position-based combat (compared to WoW and other MMOs) which has made me cry a few times, which makes me crave the next installment in the story. I've never found a villain redemption arc to compete with some of those found in this game.
Mass Effect Trilogy: A pretty boring ability shooter whose difficulty lies in bullet sponges. The story it weaves for a surprisingly immense cast of characters is astonishing.
Neir Automata/Reincarnation: A pretty standard Platinum spectacle fighting game, with a branching story system which will outright fuck with your mind. The story is ridiculously deep and convoluted, with absurd characters you'll love even as they're ripped from you.
Anyways, all that to say that I can understand why people would prefer mechanics over story, but I'm definitely not one of them. :)
So, how do you make a game that's just "good"? Not "good for some players", but just "good"? Logically, the only way to do this is to make the game customizable and configurable, so that every player can choose to make the game their own perfect game. This isn't possible, so the next best thing is to make a game that is perfect for some people, and the ideal is to have a wide variety of different kinds of games.
I'll also note that having every game configurable would be a downfall as well. A big part of connecting to other people over a game is knowing that you played the same game. If everybody tweaks every game to their liking (or in some future we just use AI to generate our perfect games), then we lose the ability to connect meaningfully to one another over shared experiences.
So love what you love about games. Don't let anybody tell you that you're wrong, as long as you accept that what you love about games is wrong for very many other people as well. Personally, I love a good story, but it's entirely secondary to gameplay for me. If a game is mediocre with a good story, I simply can not play it. I'd rather read a good book, because I've never played a game with a story as good as most books, movies, or even TV shows that I've enjoyed. If I'm ranking quality of story out of all stories I've experienced, the top video game probably comes quite far down on the list, beyond 30 or 40 books, movies, and shows.
[0]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
Of course games are way more than that, and storytelling is not limited to full stories.
World building, character design and even the “metaphors” we use in game mechanics ARE types of storytelling and benefit from narrative design.
Thanks for pointing this out, it might be helpful for other people that are not necessarily writers trying to create interactive stories.
But maybe that's just me.
Yeah, they're a fairly niche method of storytelling, just a bit more involved than Visual Novels (which themselves are roughly a choose-your-own-adventure comic book). Their gameplay focuses very heavily on exploration.
But some of those stories are really well told using these mediums.
Having to use my player "agency" to re-enact the deaths of family members in Gone Home was really hard in some cases.
Me either, but I have nothing against people who enjoy them, and it does seem like a fun enough writing exercise to create one as a writer.
Not everything needs to be for me. I never want to play a walking simulator, but nobody's making me, so whatever.
"in a book (or movie or tv show) the reader can either keep reading, or stop. that's it. that's as far as their agency can go."
At best, this is overly naive. At worst, it feels like intellectual dishonesty.
I can start or I can stop. I can rewind a chapter, forget about it for a month, pass out listening to an audio book. Some times, depending on my mood, the book, and my interaction with that book can be dramatically different. And all these things are going to change my perception and interaction with that book.
Even if it's a book I've read before and know how it ends, there is a lot more that feed into "agency" than just 100% on or off.
I’ll think a bit more about this and see if it changes the point I’m making in any significant way, otherwise I’ll correct the statement in a future email.
Is it ok if I mention your comment there?
Thanks :)