I am super looking forward to game designer Jonathan Blow’s upcoming game The Witness. Playing his surprise hit platform puzzler Braid gave me enormous respect for him as a designer and innovator in the medium. Reading that he is essentially gambling all the money gained by Braid’s success on bringing his vision for The Witness to life just increases that respect.
But to be clear, what excites me about The Witness is the prospect of learning its game play, working the puzzles and seeing how they interact towards the game’s climactic elements. What I’m not looking forward to is the game’s writing, by which I mean anything in it that you read or is read by an actor. Because experience tells me it just won’t be that good.
Here is a random sampling of the writing from somewhere around midway in Braid.
But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life's achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.
All I can get out of that is a contrived and badly overwritten comment about how expectations in a relationship can limit you, but what it means doesn’t much matter anyway. It’s sole relation to the game’s plot (such as it is) is it communicates the idea that Tim’s relationship with The Princess has Issues. At the point in the game this text occurs, reiterating this idea is completely superfluous. Indeed, everything you need to know about it for the sake of playing is communicated in the first line of formal text in the game:
Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.
This is a decent bit of writing, it is brief and direct and it plays with your sense of the usual dynamic of the barest of bones videogame plot (the bad guy took your girlfriend and you have to fight your way through to rescue her) with that little twist (and it was your fault it happened).
Two things make Braid great. The first is the wonderfully engrossing game play of solving spacial/temporal puzzles with its combination of traditional platformer skills and time-manipulation mechanics. It is absolutely this, rather than moving through the “story,” that keeps you playing Braid. And that’s fine: nobody plays a classic Mario for the story (spoiler alert: the Princess is in another castle, until she’s not).
But Braid rises above this tradition not solely through its innovative gameplay. It adds the icing of a genuinely satisfying game-narrative arc, by which I mean the whole experience of play from its fantastic, beautiful atmospheric opening scene, through the very effective temporal dynamic of the final levels, culminating in the superbly effective final boss. That last involves a narrative touch that I could easily sum up in a few simple sentences, but no need for spoiler warnings here. All I need to communicate is that this touch is surprising, simple, easy to understand, and it wraps up the game in perfect sync with its play dynamics and minimalist, referential narrative.
And then there is the text. Not to belabor it but the basic reality of the text is that it is just not great. Obfuscated, overwritten, generally delivering a tone of contrived artiness. Above all these deficiencies though is that it simply adds nothing of real substance to the narrative. Braid would play exactly the same with almost all the text removed. One pithy sentence on par with the opening line per level would manage the same effect.
When you add the fact that everything not-great about the text is present in spades in the game's dénouement level, I have to say that the writing actually detracts from the game. It sucks energy out of the great climax and renders the small, quiet puzzles of the post-ending’s interstitial world (which are conceptually a great element in and of themselves) less satisfying. The only proper reaction to these final textual elements (that isn’t motivated by frankly slavish, uncritical devotion to the game as a whole) is to go “What?” and “Huh?”
I feel like I have to stress before I go on that the writing in Braid isn’t terrible. It is merely not great (okay, probably even not good) which is a shame because the game is great. It is great game design, great art, great music... and mediocre writing.
Bad writing in videogames is practically canonical, setting you up the bomb and so forth. Bad writing in independent, experimental, innovative games is a pet peeve though because damn it, the designers of these games ought to know better.
Braid has a great game narrative because Jonathan Blow is a great game designer. Braid has great art because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great artists so he went out and hired an artist. Braid has great music because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great musician so he went out and searched for great music by musicians. Why doesn’t Jonathan Blow know he is not a great writer?
Why do video game designers not know that they are not writers? Do they think that game design and writing are the same thing? They don’t narrate their own product when it’s time to record the audio for the game, they hire a professional voice actor. Which is good because you have to be a professional to even marginally pull off something like this:
Just to review that text...
I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I’ve been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.
This is gobbledygook, a mishmash of metaphors couched in ostentatious prose (wait is the paper a boat, or a cage, or you’re the paper and you’ve folded, and it’s an airplane? Sorry an aeroplane? And about this... fibre? The pulped vegetation? We’re talking about, like, paper again, right?). I’m sorry, and I’m not saying I could do better, but that is just what it is. The game looks beautiful. The music sounds beautiful. But the sum total of the narrative scope I get out of the paragraph (aside from feeling like I’m in for another beatin’ from the Art Stick) is that The Princess is in Another Castle.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason for this is that it was written by Dan Pinchbeck and Dan Pinchbeck is a digital artist and a game designer. Dan Pinchbeck is Dan "not to be mistaken with the writer Daniel Pinchbeck" Pinchbeck, the not writer. thechineseroom game team doesn't have any writers. It has artists. It has a composer. Nobody has the title writer. Is it that they don't believe they need one? Or that they think they already have one, but that it isn't an important enough role to put it in an actual title?
Please. Game designers. You can be so good at what you do. It is exciting. It is a new medium. It is art. But text is text, it’s not game design and it is a different kind of story than the one you tell with games. There are so many great writers out there scrapping in a terrible market. Hire writers. Hire writers and explain to them what the game means to you and the story you are trying to tell and let them play the games and figure out how to properly tell that necessary allotment of text that you read or hear as you play the game. Let them do their job, let them amplify and perfect your vision the same way artists and composers and voice actors do.
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