On Gameplay, Writing and The Holy Spirit (Narrative)
On Gameplay, Writing, and The Holy Spirit (Narrative)
Please feel free to leave a comment if you think I got this all wrong, or if you have strong opinions on Michael Fried.
Happy holidays.
-Sam
There’s been a torrential wave of discourse on the topic of Video Game Writing on X: The Everything App over the past few weeks. The boiling point might have been the ongoing viral tear of This Video, which seems to perfectly encapsulate the issue of how AAA devs are increasingly approaching writing video game dialogue. It’s a fantastic video if you haven’t already seen it: the ultimate in-joke, a perfectly pitched satire and critique; if you get what it’s going for, it fucking hurts (as many others have noted, the phrase “focus, M” has settled pretty permanently in my brain, right next to Amazing Mobile Game’s “I need to blink”).
Outside of users deservedly praising the AAA Mario video, the main sentiment I’ve seen from a lot of folks is: why is video game writing still so bad compared to film and TV? Why can’t games have good writing too? Why are we stuck with “focus, M?”
There are a lot of different answers to this question, some financial, some political— many games don’t have bad writing, some of this “bad” writing exists for the same reason yellow paint does, sometimes there’s just too many cooks in the kitchen, etc. But this whole ordeal seems to echo, or exist within, the much longer, fifty years and counting, “games as art” debate, which I think is a more interesting starting point.
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| credit: @viperwave |
Fans of games probably agree that the general public’s unwillingness to distinguish a game as Art unless its writing mirrors the construction or quality of more accepted forms like film or literature (i.e. The Last of Us) is fundamentally backwards. My favorite foil for this distinction is Tetris (1988), which is, for a myriad of reasons, powerfully transformative in effect, and endlessly dissectible as an art object despite, its complete lack of any Writing.
But analyzing Tetris will only get you so far in convincing a skeptical public of games as art. The pure gameplay of Tetris places it—artistically— somewhere closer to Donald Judd’s conception of an Art Object, a literalist piece that, as Michael Fried describes in "Art and Objecthood" (1967), “...[relies] on a particular theatrical effect or quality, a kind of stage presence” than a film or novel (Fried, 1967). It is a fundamentally tougher sell, even to someone familiar with the qualities of conceptual art.
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| Donald Judd, Untitled (1967) Credit: Judd Foundation |
Like all conceptual art, Tetris’ unitarianism, its literalist quality, its sheer nakedness, does not indicate an absence of narrative. Instead, Tetris’ inherent narrative is generationally sturdy, conveyed effectively in the first seconds of gameplay. Even before you learn you can clear lines, there is a distinct understanding that you have been thrust against an unstoppable force of falling Tetriminos, and your goal is to survive it’s inevitability. Of course, this makes for a great video game, if not the best, and many have argued so.
I’ve written before about Tetris, and so has & should everyone else, but it’s a good baseline for understanding what we should be considering when we talk about narrative in video games. Narrative gives gameplay its bones, and a game having “good writing” need not apply. Eoghain Meakin puts it well in Video game structural layers for narrative design and articulation, “The most apparent form of meaning for the player is the narrative story or context. However, the narrative in a video game is structured and contextualized itself by the inherent form of the video game” (Meakin, 2024).
Of course, good narrative can also be achieved through good writing: these are two means to a common end. And they often exist simultaneously— to a point where it may be tough to differentiate between the two. But a game’s written word ought to exist in tandem and harmony with it’s formal gameplay narrative.
For an example: the inherent, or agentic narrative of Super Mario Bros. (1985) is to continue rightwards to reach the end of each level without encountering a game over screen. This, combined with the games’ inclusion of a timer and a run button, suggests at least some sense of urgency. The more popular narrative of Super Mario Bros.— which seldom pokes its head outside of the manual and back of the box description— is to rescue Princess Toadstool after she’s been captured by a Large Turtle.
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| An excerpt from the original Super Mario Bros. US manual credit: Nintendo |
Of the two, only the latter has become the enduring legible narrative of Super Mario Bros., despite it being largely irrelevant to the games’ moment-to-moment gameplay. It’s a simple story that works well for advertisements, merchandising, and a billion-dollar animated film franchise. But the success of this fairytale is owed, crucially, to how well it lines up with the inherent gameplay narrative of "running to the right.”
This is a luxury Tetris will never have. There is no fitting fairytale to map on to Tetris, and that’s not for Pajitnov’s lack of trying. (What are you going to do, sell a hat?) For the modern Tetris Company, all there is left to sell are the stale afterimages of static Tetriminos— simulacra of the game itself, literalist art objects that are purely, as Michael Fried describes critically, theatrical:
“the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art” (Fried).
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| Title screen for Pajitnov's Hatris (1989) credit: TetrisWiki |
As offspring, a Super Mario Bros. plushie exists as a work of art itself in the most classical tradition. It is a portrait, a sculpture, an inescapable pictorial illusion; Toy Mario is classified beyond conceptual objecthood for reasons beyond it’s anthropomorphism. It has captured the minds of millions of aspiring filmmakers, and its existence is owed to its source material’s layered narrative cohesion. Were there no founding myth, there would be no sculptures of Sun Gods.
On the other hand, a Tetris-themed desk lamp is simply that which describes it. It is pathetic, hollow theater. Less graciously, Tetris merchandise is the negation of art. And unfortunately, there is simply no businessman savvy enough, no story-driven spinoff good enough to get around the fact that rearranging falling Tetriminos doesn’t feel anything like a story.
We can pretend there’s a story to Tetris, throw a few sprites on screen and some accompanying dialogue, but we are still nowhere closer to that “run right and save the princess” narrative harmony. In fact, I reckon Tetris would have done worse globally if there was some shoehorned, overly narrativized “point” to why you are arranging Tetriminos. Tetris, if we view it as art, is precisely the kind of art Michael Fried laments (and begrudgingly praises) in “Art and Objecthood.” It is at once both entirely alien and unequivocally human, daunting, infinite and cohesive, its narrative impossible to analogize, and yet completely instinctive.
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| I don't remember the source of this image. Sorry. It's been on my computer for a long time. |
Clearly, a reinforced marriage between gameplay narrative and traditional “written” narrative is important to a game’s lasting impact, and how it will be experienced—both played and critically received— as a “good or bad” game, with “good or bad” writing. But— and this is startling as it may negate much of what I’ve said previously— I’ve come up against a question: How can we assume a game’s experiential gameplay narrative (i.e., Tetris) is any less written than a game’s fairytale narrative (“our princess is in another castle!”)?
What arbitrary line are we drawing when we declare a game “poorly written” simply because its cutscenes sound like airport schlock, or its characterization is shallow compared to the average quality of an Oscar nominee? Is Tetris a poorly written game because it lacks formal comparison? Is Super Mario Bros. 3 a poorly written game because Toad uses the incorrect spelling of “your” in the card flipping mini-game? Is this really all we can fathom counts as writing when it comes to video games?
It certainly shouldn’t be. Tetris is a well written video game, not despite its lack of words, but precisely because of it. Gameplay and writing are not two separate sides of an equivalent coin, they are the metal and its engraving. One cannot exist without the other. They each, in simultaneous dance, make each other Real. Video game writing exists in a spectrum of infinite layers between “word” and “experience". A game’s narrative is born from the intrinsic natural outcome of this process.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t answer our question of why “focus, M.” seemed to ricochet across the internet like a sleeper agent trigger word, or why AAA games all seem to sound like that lately. It does, however, provide us with some much needed clarity. Video games are not movies, they are not television, and they are certainly not novels. When we discuss writing in video games, we must look deeper than the prose that appears onscreen, and we must consider what writing actually means in the context of the medium. Formal comparisons between video games and prose simply don’t help us in better understanding an art that requires such extraordinary presence, duration, and independent experience.
On experience, Michael Fried writes about the quality of endlessness which he defines as mandatory to so many works of “Objecthood,” (such as the sculptures of Donald Judd, David Smith, and others). He writes towards the end of his essay,
“…at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest. It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it” (Fried).
But we can talk more later. Bowser’s Castle should be just up ahead.
great write!
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