There’s a widely-understood guideline in screenwriting. It’s not necessarily widely followed, partially because it’s a guideline and partially because a lot of screenwriters are total dogshit hacks, but everyone knows it: “Show, don’t tell”.
Convey as much as possible through moving visuals and the subtleties of behavior. Convey as little as possible by having some chucklefuck straight-up explain it on-camera.
Essentially,
The tools that this medium uniquely allows should be the ones you use the most.
Makes sense. If your audience wanted to be told a story, they wouldn’t be in a filthy crowded theater looking at a screen twice the size of the asshole in the row behind them who keeps dropping popcorn in their hair. They’d go home and read a book. They might even go home read a good book, and then your hack screenwriter ass would be fucked.
So let’s talk about video games.
Games, like films before them, are a new medium that combines a bunch of old media tools with a few that are very new and very unique. Also, like films, they’re a heavily commercial industry oversaturated with crap. That crap is made by people with a shit understanding of how to use the tools they’ve been afforded.
Unlike films, games don’t have a key Golden Guideline that can go a long-ass way toward helping them stop sucking. Until now. I’m giving games a guideline out of the kindness of my heart. You’re welcome.
Films have “show, don’t tell.” Games need “do, don’t show”
As much as humanly possible, leave the player in control.
This doesn’t mean every game needs to be an open-ended sandbox. It means that the player character’s accomplishments should be the player’s accomplishments. The player shouldn’t be watching things happen, or even making things happen. The player should be doing things.
There are some games out there that are super-guilty of this shit, and it needs to stop. Call of Duty is a borderline case, breaking the rule with enough panache that it often works out decently enough, even though it’d be better off breaking it a lot less. Comparable to a Tarantino movie, where Quentin’s snappy dialog can usually keep his exposition tolerable. Battlefield 3 is much worse, actively and often arbitrarily punishing the player for straying off its rails. Nobody has finished Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign. They’ve all killed themselves.
Third-person action-adventure games have an annoying tendency to fall into this issue during combat. Games like Arkham Asylum ask only that the player hit one button a bunch of times, and Batman will pretty much do whatever the hell moves he wants. It’s fun to watch and makes for a great trailer, but you didn’t beat up those clowns. Your role was that of Robin, tied up on the ground and shouting “Batman, do something” and then congratulating him afterwards. Assassin’s Creed largely discourages the player from attempting to fight at all; during combat you have one tactic that’s worth a damn, and that tactic is “press X at the right moment to watch Ezio kill this guy for you”. You can do that in Batman too if you want. It’s fun a few times, until you realize how little you’re actually doing.
You’re not playing here. You’re watching. That’s bad. You’re a bad person.
I’m not going to touch on the Japanese games that do this here, and that’s because I would literally die if I tried. If you’re feeling like some self-harm, though, go check out the demo for Asura’s Wrath. The game came out yesterday, the demo’s been out a while, and if it’s not the most insipid fucking non-game you’ve ever sat through then you have wrong opinions.
What I’m getting at here is this: in film, exposition is a crutch. In games, non-interactive elements are crutches. Sometimes you need a crutch to walk. Sometimes you keep using a crutch even when your leg is fine. This makes you a prick.
Don’t be a prick.
