Jeff Vogel has been making games longer than most AAA companies today. Since 1994. And he's stayed afloat through the whole shareware era and into this modern world. He's got the chops.

And recently, he wrote a blogpost about video game writing. Jeff is a refreshingly frank man who holds little to nothing back about his ways.

His six truths are:

1. When people say a videogame has a good story, they mean that it has a story.
2. Players will forgive you for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.
3. The default video game plot is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." If your plot is anything different, you're 99% of the way to having a better story.
4. The three plagues of video game storytelling are wacky trick endings, smug ironic dialogue, and meme humor.
5. It costs as much to make a good story as a bad one, and a good story can help your game sell. So why not have one?
6. Good writing comes from a distinctive, individual, human voice. Thus, you'll mainly get it in indie games.

There's more in the blogpost, of course. But what do you think? Does the man who has been making games since 1994 speak true? What do you agree or disagree on?

Ooo. I didn't know he made another blog. I like reading his stuff.

I do agree that most game writing isn't anything special. Even the most praised video game stories tend to be barely on the mediocre bargain bin novel level.

The top comment on the post makes some very good points, in particular the statement about "They want to engage with the story at their own pace.". In fact, that's sometimes how I feel; I am more likely to engage with a game's story if I've already had a chance to engage with the gameplay. In particular, I'd rather have a game that dumps you off in the middle of nowhere (or, perhaps, on the world map right by a town with starting equipment for sale, as the original Final Fantasy) does, then have a game where I have to sit through an intro with plot before I can get to the actual gameplay.

Another thing, that isn't mentioned in his post at all, is the idea of telling the story through the gameplay. Celeste is an example of a game that does it well, particularly if you look at one particular chase sequence, as well as the one actual (and rather lengthy) boss fight (in a game that doesn't typically have combat). This way, you can present the story without taking the player out of the game to do so.

Also, not every game needs a story to be good. In fact, this is even true of the RPG genre. In any case, no story is likely better than a bad story. (The only exceptions I'll make are for genres like visual and kinetic novels, where story is the whole point of the game.)

Edit: Why the low rating? Could somebody please point out what I said that is inappropriate?

I dont know, I'd have expected more from it. He claims a lot of things that are easy to say but hard to prove and that sound more like your average rant than wisdom (when gamers say something is true and wise, they really mean it's full of common prejudice and truisms - see, I can do it too! ;P). Some of these claims even seem contradictory ... Like, how is it possible to make a good living by selling videogames with good writing as your USP if players will accept any simple plot as good story or actually prefer to ignore stories? Also, he put in a picture of Subnautica, with the caption that the secret to a solid story is to keep it simple, but at no time he talks about storytelling being more than a plot, and I find that particularly remarkable seeing that he compares games with books without mentioning the differences between the two, the possibilities in storytelling that are unique to games. Stories aren't just created by words alone. I like Jeff Vogel and what he's doing, but this article feels like I've read it before and I've learnt nothing new or substantial from it. It doesn't sound deeper than your average forum post ...

Also, "nobody buys books anymore"? Really? :D

Me literally taking a break from organizing my wishlist on bookdepository, and checking some threads on GOG... Really!!??!!

2005 called, and would like to have its narratology vs ludology debate back. Jeff Vogel is a good game designer, and have written some very good game design books (which no one apperantly read anymore...), but this feels like a throwback.

edit: as an example "3. The default video game plot is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." If your plot is anything different, you're 99% of the way to having a better story.". I am perfectly fine with that, depending on the game this is all the plot and narrative i want / need. what makes the game interesting is how I kill that guy, not spending 3 hours reading his backstory and exploring his motivations before the game finaly let me whack him... preferably with heavy machinery and some massive explosions....

I didn't even read to the end. I'm sorry, but it's just pseudo-wisdom bullshit.

"If you are in the mood for good storytelling, you can watch a movie. Or a TV show. Or (shudder) read a book. Each of these is a thousand miles beyond the best video game in terms of storytelling."

No medium is better by default. Is Twilight "a thousand miles beyond" Ghost of a Tale just because it is a book? Are the Marvel films "a thousand miles beyond" My Memory of Us or Bastion's storytelling just because they are movies? It's such a stupid statement, it's honestly kind of sad to read.

"Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 are hailed as two of the best-written games ever" - I've seen lots of (deserved) praise of Psychonauts, and I don't think I ever heard that claim.

"The default video game plot is, "See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy." - I think it's been literally decades since this statement has been true. Even if we were to only look at AAA games (which we shouldn't) this would be a hell of a stretch.

"There are a lot of people out there who have put hundreds of hours into World of Warcraft, myself included. If you quizzed us all on World of Warcraft lore, 99% of us would get an F-, guaranteed."

Memorising lore has little to do with appreciating a story. I'm a big fan of Dune and if you quized me on its lore I'd probably get a C. And the same person can play WoW ignoring all the flavor text and then get completely lost in Alan Wake's story.

Honestly this reads like something from a person with barely any knowledge of gaming, not someone who has been working in the idustry for years. If you didn't tell me that, I'd probably think this is some journalist who never played a game in theri lives until they picked up WoW and the newest Call of Duty as "research" for this text.

I disagree with practically everything.

1. If people say that the game has a good story, they mean it has a good plot. The plot is actually only the part of the story.
2. If people can play the game while ignoring the story, you clearly have a ludo-narrative dissonance problem.
3. Completely untrue. Simply having an antagonist doesn't make a story better or worse.
4. Trick endings, smug dialogue, and meme humor are clearly an incomplete list of "plagues". Honestly, Mr. Vogel should've stuck with just "bad writers resort to cheap tricks", which he actually said in his blog while explaining "the plagues" part.
5. No. Making a good story requires checking for consistency on regular basis. It takes way more effort than just pulling ideas out of one's arse without considering if they fit together or not.
6. Actually, I agree with that. For the game to be good, everyone should follow a single vision of a single person. Sure, other team members can have their input but the leader should always check so that input fits the vision of the game. AAA games can have that too if they are not "designed by committee", it's just a very rare case.

I agree with him that most video games' storytelling writing sucks very badly, and that AAA devs almost never put a good story into their games.

I also agree with him that putting a mediocre story into a video game makes it great, relatively speaking, since most video games have terrible and/or non-existent stories.

I don't agree with him that Subnautica is an example of good storytelling. I played that game for few hours and I barely understood what was going on, because it provided little to no explanation of anything that was going on (meaning, it was guilty of bad storytelling).

Credit where credit is due: In one of the captions, the guy shits on the insanely overrated Spec Ops The Line for all the right reasons.

Didn't care enough to read the rest of this article.

some points / elaborations. A story is what it is about, plot is the timeline in which it takes place, the order of the events. So they are seperate, but interconected. Plot is not part of a story, but rather how it is told. You can also talk about narrative designs here, which is the differnt way of telling the same story. the narrative designs are directly connected to the plot, but you can have the same story told through many different narrative designs. This is not what ludo-narrative dissonance means. Ludo-narrative dissonance is when the story and the gamplay are 'telling' different and oppositional things. For example if you are playing as a female archiologist, but all you do is killing endangerd animals, break old vases and destroy old ruins. There is a dissonance between the story and the actions of the game. Or if you are a goody-two-shoes characer out to save the world, but all you do is shoot people in the face. If the player can play the game and ignore the story, then there is no dissonance, the story just dont matter.

How can they be separate if the plot is literally the timeline of the story events? It's like saying that form of the cup is not a part of the cup's design.

Actually, there is dissonance. Just, as you've said, player can play the game and ignore the story, thus ignoring the dissonance.

These examples have nothing to do with ludo-narrative dissonance. There are movies with those exact narratives without any "ludo" part to dissonance with.

He also writes, under his own game's screenshot: "We sell words. We’re in the word-selling business." That somewhat reminds me of the devs who advertise that they have a gazillion words in their game, which frankly I find off-putting (and I'm saying that as someone who likes stories). IMO, a lot of games put too much store in word count, and their storytelling could be better if they used a lot less of them. True, he does not speak of quantity here, but it's an unfortunate association I get. "Words" doesn't mean anything out of context, it's all about how you make use of them, ofc.

He also compares apples with oranges, seeing that his games are epic RPGs and not shooters or open world crafting and survival games or whatever. That oversimplification of "see that guy? now kill him" doesn't adequately describe any story I remember from the history of RPG videogames. Actually, it doesn't really fit to stories in other genres either, unless you reduce them all to the lowest common denominator - if you do that, most stories in books and movies would sound pretty dumb as well.

I do agree that there is still a lot of room for improvement in videogame stories, and that many videogame stories are nothing to write home about, often just a bunch of overused deja vu tropes, as a pretense to have a story at all, be it out of nostalgia or due to the devs' lack of ideas. And it's also true that games that try to do something different and more than the absolute minimum already have a good chance to get praised for the effort alone. But that's something that every gamer can notice, not really a groundbreaking insight. ;)

What? I was expecting rules 4-6 to be a remake of the first 3 rules, is this really him?

Okay, how about the story in the game tries to convey you're a sensitive human being who cries over having to kill a deer for food, but the game mechanics reward you for mass killing and brutal finish moves?