Video games can be enormous, sprawling affairs that take up huge portions of our consciousness.
In terms of raw time investment, a movie usually requires 1.5 to 3 hours.
A TV series might take 10 to 20 hours per season.
Even the average novel, with a word-count of about 75,000 words, only takes the standard reader 6 hours and 15 minutes to complete.
Games are, of course, all over the place, taking anywhere from under an hour or two to...
...well, every waking minute of your life.
But if we think specifically of AAA games with a narrative focus, we're generally looking at a 15 to 40 hour commitment.
So I think it's fair to say that these sorts of games tend to ask us for at least as much of our time as watching a season of a TV show.
And yet, in terms of ponderable narrative information delivered, games often provide us with far less than a film or a television show.
Why?
The reason for this is simple: games get to use far fewer words per minute than any other narrative medium.
Because most of the time you're playing a game, you're playing the game.
When you're in the middle of the action, all the game's gonna throw at you are a few vocal barks and voice dabs.
Now, one estimate I saw said that TV scripts, on average, end up with about 120 words per minute of dialogue.
So recently, I timed my play on a few narrative heavy games:
The Witcher III, The Last of Us, and Final Fantasy XIII
And I got an average of sixteen words per minute.
Now that's a very small sample size and my counting probably wasn't perfect...
...'cause it's hard to keep track of the number of unique vocal barks you're hearing in the middle of combat...
...but I'm not off by a factor of ten.
16 compared to TV's 120 is an enormous difference.
And that difference is compounded by the fact that a lot of those sixteen words are not directly used for narrative or characterization.
No, no, they're used for something that no other medium has to deal with:
information for the player.
Much of the dialogue we put in has to be dedicated to letting the player know that there's a doodad they've gotta get.
Or warning them they're getting shot, or telling them that they're headed the wrong way.
Ultimately, this means that for a video game:
Every word, every line of dialogue is precious.
We have to get the most out of every phrase we write, including lines that give the player instructions.
And herein lies the cardinal sin of so many games.
Today, I'm gonna pick on Destiny in particular because...
Phew, wow.
If you've wondered why the storytelling in that game feels so incredibly flat, it's not that their world is boring.
They've actually got a pretty interesting world to play with.
And it's not the voice acting's fault either.
That game has got a pretty incredible cast of actors who are given nothing to work with.
Nah, I'll tell you why the story feels so flat.
If you look at all the dialogue written for the Ghost, who is arguably the game's main character...
...he's got far more lines than any other character in the game...
...practically every single line the Ghost says is either instructional text or a throwaway line.
So first, let's talk instructional text.
When I say "instructional text", I don't just mean a character saying, "Press X to open the door."
We've gotten a bit more subtle about it over the years.
Today's instructional text is instead often masked by a character simply talking about what they're doing.
Or what's going on in the world at the moment.
But it's all meant to clue you in to something.
Like, in Destiny, when the Ghost says:
"I don't need an access key to break into this, DOS is more complicated."
That really fiction-breaking gag is mostly there just to tell you he's still working on unlocking that computer you told him to unlock.
But there's the problem.
If all of your instructional text is a comment on the present situation with no other contextualising information...
...it serves no narrative purpose.
Functionally, it's just words without meaning, as far as your story is concerned.
But there's no reason that this is all that instructional text has to be.
With a little bit of effort, it can do a whole lot more.
Like, okay, in Metal Gear Solid V, they do this ALL the time.
Often showing the interrelationship between the characters...
Or making small comments about the world through the way they tell the player about their objective.
Now of course, that's not to say you should look to Metal Gear Solid V for all your storytelling lessons...
...but in this one particular area, the series has done generally very well.
Which leads us to the second reason that Destiny's story falls so flat:
Throwaway lines.
Throwaway lines are simply lines that are just there to fill space.
Maybe the word count is too low, or maybe somebody felt like this one stretch of time in the game felt weirdly silent...
so somebody should say something.
These lines have no subtext.
They add nothing and yet, they're all too common in video games.
So, how do you avoid these lines in your own writing?
Well, it can help to ask yourself these questions:
First, what does this line tell me about the world?
Second, what does this line tell me about the character?
Third, what does this line tell me about the other characters?
And fourth, does this line move the plot forward?
Every line you write should do at least one of those four things.
Or at the very least be so artistically valuable, like so beautiful or just so funny, that it stands up on its own.
If it's not, then it's a throwaway line that doesn't serve your narrative.
If you have only got sixteen words per minute to work with, the more of them you waste on lines like these...
...the weaker your narrative's gonna be.
In the grand, complex world that Bungie has tried to set up for Destiny, they have given themselves such a huge story to tell...
...that they can not afford to waste dialogue on purely informational text.
And they definitely can't afford to waste it on throwaway lines.
And yet...
Just as an experiment, try applying those four question I listed before to basically any line the Ghost says.
And you will quickly see just how much this ends up costing them narratively.
Given how few words per minute they have to work with...
...you can see how rapidly their dialogue is consumed with these lines that do nothing for the game.
And how quickly their ability to tell their story is overwhelmed by the inefficiency of having a script mired in throwaway lines.
In games, throwaway lines are very common during traversal.
When you've gotta get your character from one place to another place without much else to do along the way...
...the designers often fear that you're gonna get bored.
And the easy go-to solution for that is to throw in a line of dialogue to keep the players occupied.
From an engagement perspective, they're a way to mask a transition that's otherwise just not very engaging.
And yet, it's EXACTLY that sort of dead time that's perfect for more narratively impactful dialogue.
You've basically got the player's full attention right then.
As a designer, you should be noting the places where you can fit in a line of dialogue...
...that's not gonna have to compete with gameplay for the player's attention.
Why waste that opportunity by just throwing pointless words into those spaces...
...so the player doesn't notice how boring those sections would be otherwise?
Again, try listening to those lines in Destiny.
Because you will hear plenty of them as they zip you from mission to mission.
Then compare that with something like The Witcher III.
Look at the scene in The Witcher where they're dealing with the Lubberkin.
They spent five words on informational text so the player knows where to go.
And then they spend the rest of the traversal having the Witcher and the Baron discussing whether or not the Baron ever gave his stillborn child a name.
And that conversation is powerful.
It's emotional, it tells you about the world, it tells you about the characters, and it tells you how they relate to each other.
This is some amazing transitional dialogue.
They have essentially created a full-blown scene out of the player's trip from A to B.
And there's not a throwaway line in that entire walk.
I hope that helps to give perspective on why some game narratives fall so flat.
But avoiding throwaway lines is simply the first step in packing more narrative...
...into the few lines of dialogue we get to have our characters deliver in a game.
Join us next time as we talk about another important technique for squeezing more meaning and narrative information into your sentences.
See ya then.