But it's not a critic's job to offer an alternative. It's a critic's job to call a spade a spade and yell if the emperor is wearing no clothes.

What I don't get is that we have people like you whining about how cruel and unfair critics are when they call clichéd writing clichéd -- and then the VERY SAME PEOPLE whine when some mainstream gaming site gives a blowjob review to some Oblivion. What's it gonna be, Alrik? You can't have it both ways.

I just read through this entire thread and had to smile at the above post (I've decided I'm rooting for the one on the left, btw).

Maylander's example of Mozart was perfect, I thought. As brilliant as he obviously was, I remember reading a review that said listening to one of his pieces was like "listening to silverware fall on the floor." Oh, well. There's no pleasing everyone.

But Mozart mastered his craft while the writing in RPGs generally sucks, IMO. That's partially due to the medium's inherent dependency on visual expression. What makes that problem overwhelming is the current committment to the cutting edge and the costs involved with that.

Maybe that's why companies like Bioware aren't going about it the other way around, making games based on great novels. Maybe they know they wouldn't be able to do them justice, not with the current state of depiction.

edit: On second thought, I think maybe it was Tchaikovsky.

Welcome to the age of 'subjectivism'. You can't say anything is 'good' or 'bad', or that Mozart has more talent or skill or mastery of his craft than a dog crapping on a piano, because then you are injecting your own subjective standards upon others.

Bad writing? No such thing! It is your oppressive standards!

While there might be some legit argument against rigid 'better/worse' schemes, I feel the pendulum has swung a bit too far … ;)

It was you who started into a rant on game writing in general in a thread about Gaider's novel. You haven't really answered why you think him so unredeemable and a good example for bad writing given the game he worked on, though. Neither what the particular clichés that upset you so in that first chapter are.
Actually they did quite a bit of that. The point is, it simply doesn't have the same effect. E.g. an item descrption can have humour, contain analogy or references - an item model and texture can not.
The same is true in writing - while in general telling a story through the eyes of the character, through dialogue and other indirect devices may be preferable, I think it is rather easy to come up with good examples where a narrator works with good effect

Please spare me dictionary quotes, I am aware of the definition
I think it IS pretty difficult to really come up with something new - the question is if you even notice it, if its not new. But my point is, there is no universal catalog of whats cliché. I am aware of the danger of just using the deadand subjectivist argument, but it really does depend on what your audience knows.
Therefore I am opposing this simplistic advice of yours because I think it can be very counterproductive to start worrying about wether each element of your story is cliché or not - you'll probably always find someone who thinks it is. Not every use of an archetype leads to cliché, not every use of an often used plot device damns your work to be clichéd. Even your example already has three options at the end, so obviously you don't even know whats gonna happen next if I would use this particularly cliché plotline. And some things are so cliché that they are actually never used - does that make them non-clichéd again? Take Gothic 2 - it was criticized because killing Dragons is really THE fantasy cliché. Then I realized that I had never before actually played a game where I had to kill a dragon (as part of the plot), and the only books and Movies I had read or seen about that were actually rather playing with the cliché than part of it (The Hobbit, Dragonslayer). You are right in saying that if good writing dissolves a cliché it is no longer a cliché (or not perceived as such) - but that is my point - don't focus on the elements, but how it all holds together, how detailed and believable it is, wether it works for the story and what you mean to say.

Well, and most dialogue on TV is horrible, and this is the output of well paid professional screenwriters. Thanks for proving my point ;) . An interesting point may be that dialogue on TV has the advantage of being aided by visuals and other means - the expressions of the actors, camera angles, music, lighting - many of these elements are not yet available to the same degree in games (although I guess ME made an effort in that direction). I also speak of my personal experience - I have dabbled a bit in writing myself, and I found writing convincing dialogue the hardest part.

Which brings us to the point that many people love the tried and true - or the cliché, if you want. They want nothing more than another elves and dwarves story, with tree hugging elves, and bearded, ale-drinking dwarves, as long as it is well crafted. And to deliver that you have to focus on the background.
Plagiarizing was a bad choice of words. I am by no means advocating copying text without properly quoting or stating your sources. You pretty much detailed what I mean above. I should maybe have said "adapting"? - I am searching for a word thats a bit stronger than just "being inspired". Just like movies adapt literature, ancient myths, or fairytales into screenplays or just use particular characters (not a favourite movie, but "league of extraordinary gentlemen" may serve as an example), they could also be adapted into questlines or background for games.

I'm sorry, but I really don't have any better answer than Gaider's writing itself, or the samples that Essaliad posted. They're just… awful. What makes a pool of dog's vomit disgusting? Is it the smell? The texture? The color? The little chunks in it? The combination?

An item model most definitely could. Consider the props in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example. Are you saying that each individual item there doesn't tell its own story? Would a verbal description of them add to them? It's just prohibitively expensive -- in terms of labor and computing resources -- to get to that level in games.

True, true. I'm not saying "never use narrators" or stuff like that. You just shouldn't rely on them as a main storytelling method. Consider the film "Dune," for example: that felt like it was mostly people staring grimly into the camera with a voiceover explaining what they were thinking. Didn't work. Doesn't work in any visual medium. Certainly won't work in games, where the player should be in control of the pace and the action.

You did ask "what is cliché" and you do seem rather confused about what it means.

And this makes recycling clichés from a very, very, VERY small repertoire -- the stuff we've seen in fantasy/sci-fi games since for ever -- OK?

Your problem, GBG, is that you *don't* appear to understand what cliché is. Cliché is the expected, the trite, the boring, the thing-we've-all-seen-all-too-many-times. If it's done in a way that isn't any of that, it isn't cliché. And no, it is not THAT hard to think of things that aren't cliché. It's a writer's JOB to think of things that are interesting and fresh and fun; a writer who's only capable of recycling the same ol' plot and elements over and over again, that he didn't even make up himself to start with, is not doing his job. That's just plain incompetence. If you insist on defending incompetence, that's your prerogative… but I wonder why you would want to do that. I can think of a few psychological explanations, though.

(Off the top of my head, games in which you killed dragons, without a trace of irony: NWN: SoU, NWN: HotU (twice), NWN: OC, NWN: MotB, NWN2: SoZ, BG 2. I guess some of these are a bit obscure, though, so I can understand if you've never heard of them.)

Nope, it isn't. Compare any major TV series to any major game: Battlestar Galactica to KOTOR or ME, Rome to Oblivion or Neverwinter Nights or Jade Empire, whatever. The dialog is WAY better on TV. Even soap opera dialog is very skilfully written for its intended audience.

Ha! That explains it: you're an amateur writer who knows he's not much good at it, and therefore feels compelled to defend any other crappy writer he comes across. The difference, GBG, is that writing is not your JOB. You're *entitled* to being a crappy writer, just like Christopher Paolini at 14 years old was entitled to being a crappy writer.

But Gaider -- or the other game writers working for major studios -- AREN'T amateurs; they AREN'T 14-year-olds. Therefore, we have every right to demand minimal professional standards from their writing.

(I can't write good dialog for shit either, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize it when I see or hear it. Just like I can't play the piano, but I can recognize a good pianist when I hear him. So what?)

But that's the point -- it's NOT well-crafted. It's shoddily cobbled together from old junk they've got lying around the house. There's not a shred of originality in the background, ever. That's lazy and incompetent. Again, it's perfectly understandable for amateur fanfic or whatnot, but they're not amateurs doing fanfic, are they now?

Totally. I really like Sandman and Lucifer, for example, and both of them are derivative as hell. But they also manage to surprise me at every twist, have gobs of really good, yes, dialog, interesting and characterful art, and piles upon piles of original material fleshing out those bones derived from Judeo-Christian and Greek mythology plus Marvel comics.

As to Gaiders writing - I agree that the Carth bit Essaliad posted is horrible. I don't agree that the novel chapter is horrible - not particularly good, but not horrible. And especially it did not strike me as particularly cliché - and thats the point of discussion here, isn't it?

No, the problem isn't that I don't understand cliché. I do, and I can spot them just as well as you can, probably. What I am trying to get you to understand, is that pointing a finger and saying "this has an angsty elf-maid" proves nothing - because using a cliché element is not equivalent to having cliché writing. But thats exactly what people usually do when they point out cliché. Oooh it has a prince out to regain his throne! Cliché! Well, not! Hamlet is one of those, and he is not cliché. Remember that all this started because I wanted to get a little more detailed criticism from screeg who shouted cliché! without even naming such an element.

My personal weaknesses or strengths as a writer may influence my view on this (not much though this was back in my Highschool days), but I also frequently find dialogue in published books, movies, and many TV shows painful (while apparently you find it mostly OK) maybe I am just particularly sensitive there. Of course professional writers, like Gaider, should be expected to have mastered that, and if they don't it's sad. And you are mistaken if you think I feel a need to defend crappy writers. My defense relates exclusively to the linked chapter, because I simply did not find it that bad. Not particularly good, but also not a prime example of bad dialogue and horrible cliché. To that I stand, and we can discuss that, but nobody seemed to want to bother to actually discuss it so far.
And I agree that the state of writing in games is indeed worse than in the other media discussed. I merely meant to point out that it may be a little more difficult to write effective dialogue there, because of the pecularities of the medium. Someone recently mentioned the case of a screenwriter being hired by a gaming company, and failing there, because he or she didn't understand the medium and didn't manage to successfully apply her writing skills to the pecularities of writing for games - this may be one element (no more) why writing is poor in games.
Mostly, I really just had trouble using Gaiders first chapter, or Gaider himself as a particularly good example of that state of affairs.

Nice jab. Heh, I must have a very successful cliché detector, because I successfully avoided the NWN series. Mostly because I didn't much like BG, because it was somewhat… cliché… But there you go, what must have been terribly annoyingly cliché for you in G2, because you have been there 10 times already, was new and interesting for me - simply based on my gaming history.

I am not entitled to judging the backgrounds in those Bioware games. I am sure some Bioware fans would argue with you about your assessment, but I have only had a brief look at ME so far, and I haven't followed DA at all. As I asid before they also strike me as generic - but I still prefer a well developed generic background to the absence which invariably leads to a lack of consistency and internal logic in the game. I am not a huge Bioware fan myself, although I found their games as far as I played them entertaining enough. I simply liked that they seemed to have made an effort with the background, because that is something I want to see more. One of my biggest problems with Oblivion is that Bethesda stopped caring about their own lore in that game.

Essaliad said it better than I can:

"You can argue until you're blue in the face that everything's been done befoooore, how dare you have the temerity to point out when something's cliche-ridden and overdone, but the fact is that it's possible to write fantasy without plonking down every single trope in the book. Oh look, it's a king-to-be who will be accompanied by a bashful young man and a "beautiful warrior maiden" in his quest to claim his rightful throne. Please. And Gaider doesn't have anything approaching amazingly incandescent prose or wonderfully witty dialogue to redeem it, either."

So you say, but thus far, you have failed to demonstrate it.

An angsty elf-maid as such is not cliché. But if that angsty elf-maid turns out to be a reliable sidekick through many travails to reclaim your rightful throne and defeat the ancient enemy, and then during the course of the events she falls in love with you and then you happily live ever after, *that's* cliché. Of course, there's an off-chance that it won't turn out this way -- but why should we expect this to happen, when it's gone the same way EVERY SINGLE TIME Gaider has written in an angsty elf-maid/blue-tentacle-haired-alien babe/whatever? (OK, I'll give you Mission Vao -- she didn't actually fall in love with you. Thank God.)

Fine. I'll see if I have some time later to read it again and write a detailed critique. It might be a bit long, though. Will you read it if I do?

Yeah. That's called "incompetence," and I still don't see why you feel compelled to defend it. There are games with excellent dialog (VtM:B, anyone?) which shows that it can be done. The fact that most of the time it's *not* done is grounds for loud complaints, not excuses, IMO.

I think a lot of the new weird novels that are coming out at the moment are doing a good job of breathing some life into a fairly stale genre.

Of course I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before all of that becomes stale as well but at the moment it feels a lot less cliched than most tolkien-esque fantasy and is almost entirely unrepresented in computer role playing games.

The only reason why I read game related books is because of the relation. By themselves they are obviously not good enough. For me they are more like short but enjoyable extensions of the game experience than great individual reads. In the same way that they release books they also produce movies and comics i.e dead space. All that stuff works only as an extension to the game.

Whats important is the purpose of the game related material. Its even not supposed to be prime beef but just somthing that adds to the game without stealing attension from it. And as such it works.

In the 80/90s they released all kinds of printed material (journals, notes, maps, etc) with games. That stuff was not great literature but still it enchanced the gaming experience. Nowadays though they write entire books even instead of short journals and release them seperately so those that dont like this b/c class extra material can skip it.

Not sure what started this boom but i.e wing commander had like 10 books, tv series and movie in the 90s. None of that was great scifi (wc movie is 3.6 in imdb) but still fans of the game bought into it and liked it too.

Actually, I've begun a small story which I plan to be very much cliché-like. Just to see how it actually feels to write a cliché-piece.

But to me, this feels like Betrayal. Betrayal of my own self. Betrayal of my own creative source (there is one, yes, but I won't show it here). Betrayal of whgat I personally believe should be "my own writing style". Betrayal of what I believe should be "my own proper fantasy universe".

People say "besser gut geklaut anstatt schlecht neu geschrieben" or so ("better stolen [plagiarized, in this context sense] effectively than written something new badly", in a very rough translation of it), but I just can't stomach that, because to me it would feel like giving in into the taste of the masses and constantly making/producing hamburgers and pizza, although I could deliver something better.

And what's more, not only does "the critic" say "it's unoriginal", but also he or she is ready to say "this is utterly clichéd". This is like firing from two different guns at once at the writer.

Another, yet different, point is, that it is a well-known phenomenon of critics that what they praise, doesn't do too well in terms of sales.

The Art is to find a balance between both. I tink Mr. Pratchett has very much nailed it down. Among other things.

To me, it feels like being considered as a well-tasting yet simple meal by someone who is used to luxury.

My problem with that is that it addresses entirely the blurb on the website, which I have already agreed IS cliché, but none of this plays any role in the sample chapter.

Yes, that's cliché, and thanks for finally providing me with some actual examples and basis for your dislike, that's really all I wanted. If what you mention above is true (as I said I only played a few of his games) then I agree that if it wasn't cliché the first time it sure is now.

I will, but there is no reason to do it unless you feel like doing it. I would certainly be interested in the analysis. But maybe it would be more fun to discuss the writing in some games in more detail. I think a detailed discussion or comparison of Fallout 1 vs. Fallout 3 dialogue could be very interesting, but maybe that should be its own thread.

Once again (and I think I said that at least three times in my last post) the only thing I was defending was that sample chapter, and that only against the most extreme outcries of "utter crap cliché". The above are simply some thoughts about the specific problems of doing dialogue for games, and why a not so small pool of talented writers in the world does not translate into competent writing in games. There may be other reasons, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. If, as you say, it really is easy, why do we not have good dialogue? Is writing for games unattractive to real writers? Is it simply seen as too unimportant to invest in (time or salary for a good writer)? Is it a historic thing of geek gamers / designers / programmers growing into the writer role without the actual talent and blocking those positions? Is it something in the process of game design or the structure of design teams that gets in the way? Such widespread incompetence must have a reason.

I didn't say it was "really easy" (as in, anyone could do it). I did say that it's "not really difficult" (as in, any competent writer who also understands games could do it).

Why do I think the standards in game writing are so low? It's because of a self-feeding cycle of low standards and low expectations. Games started out by nerds, of nerds, and for nerds. This set the standard for writing in them. Game evolution has been centered on technical improvements -- how many polygons, how much resolution, how big worlds, how fluid animations, and so on. Consequently, gamers don't expect or demand good writing, nor reward studios that attempt to provide it. This means that studios don't bother with it either; they'd rather pay attention to the polygons and animations.

So fundamentally it's a matter of demand -- we don't demand anything better, so the studios don't bother supplying anything better. RPGWatch is not your average, mainstream woo-look-at-the-bright-lights gaming site; it's a site that caters to a more mature, more hardcore, and in some ways more demanding public. That's why I get perhaps unreasonably upset to see the same "eat yer broccoli/go read a book/what's so bad about simpering elf princesses anyway/but I don't WANT to move out of my comfort zone" excuses that feed this very cycle that keeps writing standards low. If there's ever to be improvement, *someone* has to speak up. And given what the Watch is for, I feel very strongly that it might as well be us.

Indeed :) I think if one looks at the indie games on the horizon that have received extensive coverage here it looks like there is some genuine scope for the views expressed here to influence the games that are created as well.

I believe writing for games is different from writing books. Otherwise I don't see why a good writer like Orson Scott Card who wrote the Ender series, which I've liked a lot, handled the writing in Advent Rising which I've found quite boring. Or maybe he wasn't motivated enough to write something good?

I've an alternative to offer: critics owe you nothing. Critics are not there to spare your feelings. Exploiting? Killing? If the writer in question is that thin-skinned, then he/she has no business writing in the first place--and in fact, is incapable of using criticism to improve. In short, these delicate "prey" writers probably don't write much that's worth reading in the first place. Real writers survive and grow; silly wannabes who think writing should be easy and people should deal with them kid-gloved deserve to die, rot, be forgotten. Good riddance, too. These types never had anything of merit to offer and they never will.

Very much so. There's also a bunch of alternate-history and fantasy that experiments with any number of things out there, crossing genres and knitting together different narrative styles and techniques. Fantasy is not dead yet, and there is no reason to settle for mediocrity like Paolini or Gaider--there are wonderful writers out there, if you'd just venture out of your comfort zone to look.

To say writing in games is similar to writing a book is wrong. You have so many more options in games then you do in a linear book. A author plans out his/her book from start to finish and has a general structure to how that will go. Some authors even start with the final chapter. In a game, you have so many more options presented to you. As a writer to a game you have to take the players actions into consideration when you develop main story arcs as well as side arcs. The more quests there are in a game the more difficult it is to tie it all together. Games to this point have not really had any examples of great writing (except for a handful) especailly in the rpg front.

To the person who said game novels are alot like Forgotten realms novels, I totally agree. They will never be award winning novels but they tell a good tale. Sometimes its nice to have a book that is an easy read. Not every book should be the lliad. I like to think even the mediocre writers(as some would say) have something to offer.

And one doesn't even really need alternate history, just some actual historical settings (near enough) would be wonderful to see in anything other than a strategy game.

It's a shame there isn't more collaboration between struggling writers and the gaming industry, I loiter a bit on Jeff Vandermeers blog which seems to attract a lot of amateur / early professional fantasy writers and a lot of them are either struggling for money or having to do other non writing work to pay the bills. It's ridiculous that people who want to write fantasy type work and are good at writing it are doing other things while there's AAA games with huge budgets churning out weak dialogue and shoddy plots and quests.

I'd like to see a big budget studio target some writers forums and the like and say to them "here's the setting, here's the theme, write a short story that would make a good quest / side story / pub rumour & conversation / lore etc" and see what they get. Sure there's limitations in a computer game but good atmosphere can still be used even if not as a fully interactive quest.

Saying that I thought that some of the earlier games based on novel series like the Dark Sun books or the dragonlance ones were a nice change, they all had slightly different flavours.